Happy Friday! Today’s cranky, irritable fare is from this month’s Chicago Manual of Style Q&A. I hope you have a better day than they were having when they answered their email.
Q. I’m writing a book with hundreds of direct quotations. One guy keeps saying “24/7.” Looks strange to write it “twenty-four/seven,” but that would be the standard CMOS rule, would it not?
A. Another CMOS rule is “if it looks odd, don’t do it.”
Q. What is the distinction between yeah, yea, and yay? Is each confined to a specific usage?
A. Dictionaries are terrific for looking up what words mean. I found all these words at Merriam-Webster’s free online dictionary.
Yay means “hooray”; rhymes with day
Yea means “yes” or “indeed”; familiar to many from translations of the Bible; often used in voting (“yea or nay”); rhymes with day
Yeah means “yes”; famously used by the Beatles (“She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah”); rhymes with pretty much not anything (bleah?).
Kara Church
Technical Editor, Advisory
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