Q. Is it grammatically accurate to say something like, “I’m going to dress warmly”? My hunch is no, because “dress warmly” means that I’ll be smiling and emotionally warm as I’m dressing, given that “warmly” modifies the verb “dressing.” If all that is true, then what I’m unsure about is how to fix the sentence. Can you suggest any good alternatives besides writing around it like so: “I’m going to dress in warm clothing”?

A. If you say you’re going to dress warmly, that means you’re going to put on warm clothes, whereas addressing someone warmly would mean greeting that person with affection or kindness. Words often have more than one sense depending on how they’re used; according to Merriam-Webster (among other dictionaries), warmly is no exception.

Or maybe you’re thinking of the feel badly versus feel bad principle. That’s different, though, because unlike dress, the word feel can be a linking verb. Linking verbs reflect the predicate back onto the subject—as when you feel bad, where the adjective bad modifies the pronoun you. But when you feel badly, you are literally not good at feeling something (either physically or emotionally). See also CMOS 5.175.

Q. How should one style the title of a work in a discussion not of that work, but of its title. As an example, consider the following sentence:

The novel’s title, “Pride and Prejudice,” refers to a pair of traits seen in all of its characters.

Should the title be set in roman and within quotation marks because it is a phrase being mentioned (rather than used)? Or does the fact that it IS a title prevail, so that it should be italicized and without quotation marks? Or perhaps some tertium—or even quartum—quid? My sense is that because in that sentence its referent is not Austen’s book itself but the character flaws that recur in its plot, the italics would be inappropriate. Do I have that right?

A. You might be overthinking this. The novel’s title is Pride and Prejudice, a three-word italic phrase that names a pair of traits exhibited by many people, including the characters in that book. Chicago-style italics for book titles doesn’t prevent you from discussing what the words mean.

But if you really want to get your readers to home in on the title words as words, try something like this: “The nouns in the novel’s title, pride and prejudice, refer to a pair of traits . . .” or “The nouns in the novel’s title, ‘pride’ and ‘prejudice,’ refer to a pair of traits . . .”

For the use of italics or quotation marks to refer to words as words (either treatment is correct), see CMOS 7.66.

Q. Does CMOS have guidance for the White House’s recent changes to the names of the Gulf of Mexico and Denali?

A. Relative to matters of style, yes: Spell a generic word like gulf with an initial capital when it’s used as part of a proper name but not otherwise (“the Gulf of Mexico,” but “the gulf”; see CMOS 8.54); don’t add “Mount” before the name Denali (see 8.56); and spell out “Mount” in names like Mount McKinley rather than abbreviating it as “Mt.” (see 10.35).

Other than that, it’s easy enough to confirm that the names of those two geographic entities were officially changed (at least in the United States) to the Gulf of America and Mount McKinley, respectively, in accordance with an executive order issued on January 20, 2025, by the White House. What an author does with that information will then depend on various factors, including a publisher’s house style (if any) and considerations related to historical accuracy.

For additional guidance, see the AP Stylebook, which issues regular updates geared toward those who cover the news. In a pair of updates added on January 30, 2025, that guide says to use the original name for the gulf “while acknowledging the new name,” but, for the mountain, it says that “the Associated Press will use the new official name of Mount McKinley.” For the gulf, AP points to the long history of the older name together with the fact that the gulf shares its borders with Mexico; for the mountain, AP cites the fact that it lies entirely within the United States, which lends broader authority to that name change.

Q. With coordinate adjectives separated by a conjunction, there’s no comma: “A stable and sensible approach.” I assume it would be the same for contrasting adjectives: “A sensible yet volatile approach.” Though if you wanted to emphasize the volatility, you might set it off with commas: “A sensible, yet volatile, approach.” Does this all sound right?

A. That sounds right to us, though whenever you interrupt an adjective-plus-noun construction with an intervening phrase set off by commas, the result tends to be a little awkward. If you want to smooth things out while keeping the emphasis on volatility, try rephrasing. For example:

an approach that’s sensible yet also volatile

a sensible approach, albeit a volatile one

Or you could embrace the interruption by applying something stronger than commas:

a sensible—yet volatile—approach

a sensible (yet volatile) approach

See also CMOS 6.51.

Q. I work in curriculum. I need to be able to spell out large numbers so as to model how to read numerals correctly. I can find rules for when to hyphenate whole numbers, but I can’t find any for hyphenating decimals. Specifically, I need to know when to hyphenate the words to the right of the decimal (tenths/hundredths, etc.). Please advise. Thanks so much!

A. That’s a challenging question! Let’s start with a few numbers and how we would suggest spelling them out—on both sides of the decimal point:

1,357,201.5: one million, three hundred fifty-seven thousand, two hundred one and five tenths

1,357,201.58: one million, three hundred fifty-seven thousand, two hundred one and fifty-eight hundredths

1,357,201.580: one million, three hundred fifty-seven thousand, two hundred one and five hundred eighty thousandths

1,357,201.5803: one million, three hundred fifty-seven thousand, two hundred one and five thousand eight hundred three ten-thousandths

Note that we’ve used commas between groups of numbers to the left of the decimal point but not to the right, which reflects how the numbers are grouped (and punctuated) as digits. But we’ve treated the numbers to the left of the decimal point as a single value rather than as a series (which might require a serial comma before and).

The rules for hyphenation are the same on both sides of the decimal point (see CMOS 7.96, section 1, “numbers, spelled out”). But note that Chicago’s preference for hyphenating simple fractions doesn’t apply to five tenths in the first example above, which simply names the number in the tenths place. It does, however, apply to an ordinal fraction like ten-thousandths:

five-tenths (a simple fraction)

five tenths (the number in the tenths place; see first example above)

ten-thousandths (the ten-thousandths place; see last example above)

See also CMOS 7.96, section 1, “fractions, simple.” Finally, note that some writers add and when spelling out certain numbers that include hundred (three hundred and fifty-seven thousand; two hundred and one); Chicago omits this and (see CMOS 9.5).

Q. I am wondering how best to cite, within one chapter of a multiauthor book, other chapters from the same volume. I am accustomed to simply adding “(see chapter X)” to the text, but one author is pushing back and wants to see them in the reference list. We are using author-date style.

A. Chapters in multiauthor books are likely to be consulted separately (and are sometimes offered for individual download or sale), so listing other chapters from that same book in the reference list at the end of your own chapter wouldn’t be the worst idea. But you should still let readers know that the chapter you’re citing is in the same book.

We’d suggest adding this information to the author-date reference for that chapter in your text—for example, like this: “(Smith 2025, in this volume).” The corresponding entry in your reference list would include the book’s title (per CMOS 13.109), so a similar comment shouldn’t be needed there:

Smith, Jane. 2025. “Chapter Title.” In Title of Book, edited by Joe Anyone. Publisher details.

If you cite more than a few chapters from your book, you may want to use a shortened form for the book: “In Anyone, Title of Book.” But even if you do that, you shouldn’t need to add a separate entry in the reference list for the book as a whole, the identity of which should be obvious to anyone who is already reading something from that book. For some additional considerations, see CMOS 14.10, under “author-date.”

Q. CMOS 13.128 shows how to use author-date citations in a footnote, but what about an informational footnote like, “The history of exclusion of Chinese people in the United States has been highly researched. To begin, see . . .”? Should the parentheses around the citations be removed, as in “To begin, see Chan 1991, Lee 2003, and Kurashige 2016”? Otherwise, it might seem as though the citations are substantiating the statement, rather than being offered as suggested reading.

A. In Chicago style, the “see” in “see Chan” means that you’re referring to a work rather than a person, and the year would retain parentheses whether in the text or in a note: “To begin, see Chan (1991), Lee (2003), and Kurashige (2016).” If you’re instead referring to the author in terms of the work, the wording would need to make that clear: “See the earlier efforts by Chan (1991) to digitize the archival records.”

Parentheses for the year are omitted only when the citation is itself in parentheses, in which case semicolons rather than commas separate the sources, as in “(to begin, see Chan 1991; Lee 2003; Kurashige 2016).” But if your parenthetical reference is to an author rather than a work, the year would get square brackets: “(See the earlier efforts by Chan [1991] to digitize the archival records.)” See CMOS 13.122 and 13.124.

Q: Am I showing my age? Once upon a time, a couple of decades ago, when you were ill or had an emergency, you would “call in sick.” Now it’s “calling out.” When did that happen?

A: People have been calling “in,” “out,” and “off” sick for dozens of years, but “call in sick” is the oldest and by far the most common expression for reporting one’s absence from work because of illness.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “call in sick” as “to contact one’s employer, school, etc., typically by telephone, to report one’s absence that day, esp. due to illness.” The OED’s earliest example is from the 1940s:

“This being a holiday weekend, employees in Treasury’s loans and currency section … were warned yesterday not to call in sick either today or Monday under any circumstances” (The Washington Post, July 3, 1943).

The dictionary’s first citation for “call off sick” is from a West Virginia newspaper: “Personnel who frequently call off sick … should be checked at their homes to ascertain the legitimacy of their absence” (Charleston Daily Mail, May 24, 1958).

The earliest OED example for “call out sick” is from a Massachusetts newspaper: “Bray said no one called out sick in the DPW at all this week … [due] to his demands that anyone out sick must have a doctor to certify illness” (Sentinel & Enterprise, Fitchburg, April 16, 1976).

A similar expression, “call off work,” has been around since the the mid-1960s and means “to report one’s absence from (work, school, etc.), typically by making a telephone call,” Oxford says.

The dictionary’s first citation is from a 1965 labor arbitration decision: “He would receive a final warning if he didn’t improve on the tardiness, absenteeism, and calling off work without notice” (from Labor Arbitration Awards, Vol. 65-2).

A search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which compares words and phrases in digitized books, indicates that “call in sick” is clearly the most common of the four expressions.

We’ve seen suggestions online that “call out sick” may be especially popular in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, but we’ve seen no linguistic evidence to support this. The Dictionary of American Regional English doesn’t mention the usage.

The 2025 slate of Oscar nominees recognizes many writers, directors and actors whose scripts and performances don’t necessarily reflect their own cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley, both white, co-wrote “Sing Sing,” a story about rehabilitation through art in a maximum security prison where the characters are almost entirely people of color.

Meg LeFauve has now earned her second nomination for penning a script that gives voice the gamut of emotions surging through a young girl in “Inside Out 2.” She’s in her 50s.

The director of “Conclave,” Edward Berger, its writer, Peter Straughan, and its lead actor, Ralph Fiennes, are all self-proclaimed lapsed Catholics. Yet they brought to life a political thriller set in the Vatican.

“The Brutalist” was written entirely in English, but much of the film’s dialogue is in Hungarian, with two leads who are not native Hungarian speakers.

Most screenwriters endeavor to craft characters outside their own backgrounds and experiences. But concerns about authentic language representation and cultural accuracy persist, and accusations of cultural appropriation and lazy research are commonplace.

“Emilia Pérez,” for example, has been heavily criticized not only for unrealistic portrayals of gender transition but also for inauthentic depictions of Mexican culture and accents.

We surveyed over 50 current members of the Writers Guild of America, and they broadly told us that sensitivity to linguistic representation has increased since the 2010s.

Several commented that there’s been more commitment to hiring writers who represent the characters’ voices and backgrounds. There’s also more “freedom to include diverse characters and worlds… but a commensurate emphasis on authenticity and a higher bar for what that means,” as one writer explained.

“Authenticity” was consistently cited in our survey as a principal consideration when writing dialogue. Other concerns included scripts’ intelligibility, historical accuracy and believability.

In our study, we also reviewed screenwriting manuals published as far back as 1946.

Manuals didn’t begin to raise explicit ethical concerns, such as the use of inaccurate linguistic stereotypes in dialogue, until the 1980s. For example, many older films, such as “Gone with the Wind,” often used phonetic spelling in their scripts, with features such as g-dropping – “quittin’” for “quitting” – to mark only the speech of lower-class or racially marginalized characters, despite the fact that all people, regardless of background, have accents.

In fact, limiting oneself to standard U.S. English restricts diversity in the written dialogue itself. Some writers may want to use dialect or language to convey character authenticity on the page.

Our survey respondents described this as “flavor” – the strategic use of dialectal words or phrases to create distinct voices, with limited phonetics. Jesse Eisenberg, in his Oscar-nominated script “A Real Pain,” lightly blends American English with occasional Yiddish words to great effect: “… landed in Galveston for some fakakta reason,” or “crazy” reason.

AI chimes in

Attempts at authenticity can become muddied when AI gets involved.

When making “The Brutalist,” Corbet controversially used AI technology to refine the movie’s Hungarian dialogue.

Some questioned the film’s authenticity due to the use of AI, arguing that nothing can be authentic if it’s achieved artificially.

But the film’s creators, including editor and native Hungarian speaker Dávid Jancsó, defended this choice. They argued the technology actually enhanced the language’s authenticity, particularly since Hungarian’s system of vowels and consonants is especially hard for nonnative speakers to capture accurately.

Whether writers use phonetics or standard language, and whether producers use AI or dialect coaches, questions of ethics and linguistic authenticity will remain. It’s important to research language choices and dialogue, and to consult the diverse speakers portrayed in scripts.

These are among the many essential checks and balances that are becoming bigger parts of the filmmaking process.

The article by Sharmila Kuthunur highlights a subtle change that might have gone unnoticed but underscores how easily history can be rewritten—especially when it’s written in code rather than in stone.

The recent alteration of Vera Rubin’s biography in the Rubin Observatory’s website serves as a stark reminder of the broader need to capture and preserve oral histories before they can be rewritten or erased. Oral histories provide an unfiltered record of lived experiences. When governments or institutions attempt to reshape narratives for political purposes, these firsthand accounts become even more valuable as a safeguard against revisionism. By transcribing and archiving oral histories, we ensure that diverse voices and untold stories remain protected, accessible, and truthful for future generations.

Astronomers are expressing disappointment and alarm as the federally-funded Rubin Observatory altered the biography of renowned astronomer Vera Rubin, for whom the facility is named, on its website. The amended version curtails her legacy of championing women in science and removes all mentions of the observatory’s efforts to reduce barriers for women and other historically underrepresented groups in the field.

“No executive order, no political edict is going to undermine or end our efforts to make the scientific workforce look more like our people,” astronomer John Barentine told Space.com. “If anything, it is giving us more encouragement to continue to do this work, because it is the morally, philosophically and politically right thing to do.”

The edits, first reported by ProPublica on Jan. 30, came as federal agencies across the government scramble to revamp their websites in order to comply with a U.S. executive order issued by President Donald Trump, which ends funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts and removes all mentions of them from public-facing websites.

On Jan. 27, a portion of Rubin’s bio titled “She advocated for women in science” was removed entirely before being republished later that day in a diluted form, ProPublica reported. As of publication of this story Tuesday (Feb. 11), the altered bio still excludes a paragraph that originally read: “Science is still a male-dominated field, but Rubin Observatory is working to increase participation from women and other people who have historically been excluded from science. Rubin Observatory welcomes everyone who wants to contribute to science, and takes steps to lower or eliminate barriers that exclude those with less privilege.”

One sentence in the final paragraph, which originally read, “Vera Rubin offers an excellent example of what can happen when more minds participate in science,” was changed to replace “more” with “many,” altering the meaning from emphasizing the need for diverse perspectives to simply highlighting a high number of people.

“This is the story of what happened in her life,” Yvette Cendes, a radio astronomer at the University of Oregon, told Space.com. “She was a huge champion for women in science in particular because she faced things that were discriminatory for women — diminishing those stories is pretty disturbing, frankly.”

Other pages on the observatory’s website, including the jobs and staff bio pages, have also been modified to erase mentions of diversity and inclusion efforts. The Observatory, its funder, the National Science Foundation, and the White House did not respond to Space.com’s request for comment on Feb. 3.

Rubin earned worldwide recognition for changing the way we think of the universe by showing that galaxies are mostly composed of dark matter, the mysterious, invisible substance that makes up much of the cosmos. Her research provided crucial evidence for dark matter’s existence through observations of stars in our neighboring galaxy Andromeda, where she found that stars moved at the same rate regardless of their position — an indication of “missing” mass, which she proposed could be explained by dark matter. Her findings shifted scientific consensus toward accepting dark matter as a fundamental component of the universe, opening new realms in astronomy and physics.

Beyond her scientific achievements, Rubin also paved the way for women in science. Perhaps most notably, in 1964, she battled to gain access to observe at the famed Palomar Observatory in California, becoming the first woman officially allowed to use its telescopes. Colleagues recall that when Rubin noticed the only restroom at the observatory was labeled “MEN,” she cut out a tiny paper skirt and taped it to the image of a man on the door. “She turned around and said, ‘Now you have a ladies’ room’ and then she got to work — that was Vera Rubin,” reads a 2021 statement from former Carnegie Science President Eric Isaacs.

Throughout her career, she championed women in the field. As one example, “she frequently would see the list of speakers [at a conference],” former colleague Neta Bahcall of Princeton University told Astronomy.com, “and if there were very few or no women speakers, she would contact [the organizers] and tell them they have a problem and need to fix it.”

“But what if she hadn’t been that fierce? What if she hadn’t been the personality that we have all come to know — the unstoppable warrior?” Isaacs said in the Carnegie Science statement. “And here’s the question that really haunts me, which is how many Vera Rubins have we lost to these kinds of obstacles?”

As similar barriers are threatening to resurface due to the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to erase initiatives aimed at improving diversity in science, the astronomy community seems to be remaining steadfast in its refusal to reverse decades of progress.

“Astronomy is not going to let Vera’s contributions be forgotten,” said Barentine. Various groups are actively working to use tools to archive content that has already been removed, as well as content that could potentially be erased from federal websites.

“The idea that they can somehow obliterate these sources is dead wrong — scientists in general and astronomers in particular are not going to take these threats lying down,” he said. “But we have a long road ahead and I expect there’ll be times when that road will be very difficult to walk.”

He declined to disclose the specifics of these efforts, but noted that “the forces aligned against this should be aware that it’s happening, and they won’t be able to stop it.”

Even at NASA, offices associated with DEI initiatives were shut down during Trump’s first few days in office. A recently instated, high-profile program called Here to Observe (H2O), which paired undergraduate students from underrepresented groups with scientists running NASA missions, was recently grounded. The media outlet 404, an independent journalist-founded news website, reported that NASA employees were told to “drop everything” and “scrub mentions” of a list of words from public-facing sites, including “Indigenous People,” “Equity,” “Accessibility,” “Environmental Justice” as well as “Anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.).” NASA has since removed “inclusion” as one of its core values.

The flurry of changes triggered by the directive has led to the erasure of articles featuring NASA astronomers from underrepresented communities that the agency published in years past, like this one. Now, these pages sometimes display launch schedules of past SpaceX launches instead of the original prose. The original titles appear to remain. Agency employees have also been instructed to remove their pronouns from all work communications and instead follow a pre-designed signature block adopted by the agency, NPR reported.

Astrobiologist Michaela Musilova, who served as the Director of the HI-SEAS space research station in Hawaii, told Space.com that her efforts to encourage more women, people of color and LGBTQ+ scientists to join her simulated missions to the moon and Mars resulted in more applicants from these communities.

“Representation matters — some of them told me that they only applied because they saw that others like them were successful in this sector too,” she said. During those simulated missions, “the more diverse a crew was, the more successful a mission ended up being — the team got along better, was able to problem solve more efficiently and they were also more productive with their research projects.”

The impacts of the ongoing changes, which have prompted many talented and experienced people to leave the space agency, “will likely be long-term and they could cause many interesting projects to not get pursued or finished,” she said.

On May 17, 1996 — nearly 50 years after her own graduation in 1948 — Rubin addressed the graduating class at the University of California, Berkeley, saying: “I hope that you will fight injustice and discrimination in all its guises. I hope you will value diversity among your friends, among your colleagues, and, unlike some of your regents, among the student body population.”

“I hope that when you are in charge, you will do better than my generation has.”