Bought a new AP stylebook on Wednesday because mine was lost or stolen. It's useful, and I need it to be a better copy editor. But the conservative nature of the stylebook still bugs me.

To pick the best example: the AP stylebook prefers the spelling "adviser" to the more popular "advisor." Historically, the former is probably the "correct" version, so there's a slight justification for preferring it.

Still, as the copy chief at a college newspaper, I see that word way more often than most daily editors, and it's invariably spelled "advisor." A quick Google search shows that advisor is by far the more popular form. Most dictionaries list it as a variant.

I'm fine writing "Canada geese" instead of "Canadian geese" and complimenting the stalwart by noting that they're real "troupers," but those are the kind of corrections that a reader can look at and come to understand as correct. People complain about adviser, or they continue reading and silently suspect that the writer has made a mistake.

Luckily, I have the AP stylebook as a defense. We only allow two exceptions to the stylebook at Lawrence: "professor" can function as a formal title and "internet" is (following the lead of Wired) not capitalized as a concession to its air-like ubiquity. Anything else we do by the book.

It's very useful to act shackled by the stylebook when I don't have a strong opinion or when I think a correction is valid but don't have the wherewithal to explain myself. It's a great justification. But the AP stylebook itself needs to start justifying its claims, when common usage conflicts with them. Anything else is mindless prescriptivism.

That's a slur I've picked up reading Language Log, the internet's best linguistics-centered blog and one of my new favorites. They're (fundamentally?) at odds with some of the copy-editing blogs I read, Blogslot and A Capital Idea.

Why do people think "blog" is such an ugly word? Am I just too used to it?

On a similarly esoteric note, I've disappointed that Trivia is behind us. I no longer have any justification for researching the trivial. I'll never know who wrote the note that was found inside one of the specially-made boxes Stanley Kubrick stored his research materials in. Or what Sherwin-Williams color most closely approximates International Klein Blue. Or what brand of television once inadvertenly broadcast a Navy distress signal. All questions that could have been.

I'm still interested, but I have no justification whatsoever to find this stuff out.

And if I tried to find out, I'd look like a freak and not merely an obsessive, as would have been the case earlier. During the contest I actually tried to find out the answer to the Kubrick question, which would have been my Garuda (of obscure origin, this word denotes one of the notoriously impossible final questions of the contest), but you had to call England. No one in England is awake when I'm awake.

I still plan to plug away at the Trivia webpage — at present woefully short of armadillos — as the year progresses. But that's about all I can do.

There is homework of course. Speaking of.