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I was just reading the 1897 style guide of the City News Bureau (Chicago), in the book "Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite!". Some highlights:

- Do not confuse 'night' with 'evening'.

- This office spells it 'programme'.

- Hotels are 'kept', not 'run'.

- Dead men do not leave 'wives', but they may leave 'widows'.

- 'Very' is a word often used without discrimination. It is not difficult to express the same meaning when it is eliminated.

- The relative pronoun 'that' is used about three times superfluously to the one time that it helps the sense.

- Do not write 'this city' when you mean Chicago.





For what it's worth, LWN maintains the same attitude towards "very" today.

"Very unique" has its own problem.[1] It started appearing online around 2007, according to Google Trends. Sometimes in the description of NFTs. As an absolute adjective, "unique" should not be modified.[1] But now, "very unique" has joined the vocabulary of meaningless marketing phrases.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/very-unique-and-abso...


Americans have no idea what evening is. It's always night for them.

We work past the evening without noticing :)



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