Language is constantly evolving, and it’s our job to keep up – even at Christmas Are we in Twixmas or Twixtmas? Do dinosaurs have capital letters? Is space measured in kilometres or miles? These are some of the questions we thought would be easy to answer when we were appointed as editors of the Guardian style guide in October. Journalists on the Guardian contact us every day wanting to know the correct style for the terminology in the articles they are writing or editing, and we need to make a ruling on each, or sometimes update an existing one. If there are style guide queries with obvious answers, we haven’t encountered one yet. One colleague asked if the abbreviation AI had entered the language, and was it necessarily generative or just gen? Another told us that if journalists drop the al- from Arabic names it is just like dropping the Mc from McDonald. Charlotte Naughton and Katy Guest are joint editors of the Guardian’s style guide Continue reading...