ExpanDrive

Recently, at my real job, I was circulating draft text for a website, and received an unusual edit. In indicating the party and constituent states of two congressmen, I had written (R-WY) and (R-AZ), only to have this returned to me, corrected to (R-Wyo.) and (R-Ariz.) “Ariz.?” I thought to myself. “Are you serious?”

Yes, as it turns out, they were. Despite the existence of a simple, intuitive, system for differentiating these 50 states, plus territories and outlying holdings (including the now-deprecated “CZ” for the Panama Canal) in a mere two characters, the AP Stylebook has maintained, and continues to maintain, its own rules for how the names of states should be abbreviated in text.

Beginning with the more reasonable truncations, two-word states are abbreviated with the first letter of each state, except in the case of West Virginia, which is “W. Va.”–in deference, one supposes, to the original state from which it sprang. Most single-word states are arbitrarily front-ended into two-, three-, or four-letter stubs; Massachusetts becomes “Mass.” while graphemically similar “Pennsylvania” becomes “Pa.”

Four- and five-letter states are to to be left unabbreviated, which, alongside the the four-letter abbreviations above, would suggest a maximum character length of five (all of the abbreviations must conclude with an archaic period, so that readers can know that Kansas City is in Missouri, and not the newly-minted state of “Mo”).

Sadly, California sees fit to ruin everything by truncating to the six-character “Calif.”, no doubt to avoid the rank informality of “Cali”. Alaska and Hawaii have no set abbreviation, allegedly because they are not part of the contiguous 48 states, but more believably because they became states long after people realized the utter futility of this system.

This arcane stylistic pedantry would be quite funny, if not for the thousands of English language publications prostrating themselves before it each day. How you can work for an organization that strives to, in part, to point out the unscientific nature of Creationism*, while adhering to this anachronistic orthodoxy, is beyond me.

The parallels to religion are further evidenced by the sheer number of equally arbitrary approaches: The Chicago Manual, the New York Times Manual, The Oxford Style Guide, etc. People boggled at the proliferation of sectarian conflicts worldwide need only look to the editors’ desks producing foreign service reports to see a similarly moronic battle carried out on a far more civil stage.

This plethora of abbreviations, in the face of an objectively superior system, is mind-boggling. ZIP Code requires the space of only two characters, from a set of only 26. While a letter-writer may occasionally ponder whether Arkansas is AR or AK, the confusion in translating is one-way. It’s more than apparent from Postal Code abbreviation which state is which.

It’s not like newspapers need any assistance in highlighting their cultural irrelevance, but I humbly propose that all online publication take up the ZIP Code mantle in abbreviating state names. Print publications in America have long had computer programmers pulling out their hair with the insistence that punctuation be tucked cutely inside of quotation marks, regardless of whether it was part of the original quotation. Now, it’s time for revenge.

*this is part of what my real employer does.