Always Remember to Close All Parentheses. We’re Not Paying to Air Condition the Entire Paragraph.
At last my secret can be told!
A couple weeks ago my pals Ken and Mark decided to start a Twitter feed called “Fake AP Stylebook“. In it, they’d make fun of the Associated Press Stylebook, a guide to grammar, punctuation, and usage that journalists and other professional writers rely on. They invited me and a bunch of other people to join in. We had some laughs, posted some stuff, and successfully entertained ourselves. Here are some of the things we posted:
Robots should only be referred to by gender-neutral pronouns, no matter how sexy they may be.
The correct spelling is ‘Mr. T.’ People who type out ‘Mister’ are fools to be pitied.
The noun “Wang Chung” should be capitalized, but not the verb.
If you’re short on space, “fake” may be used in place of “psychic” or “homeopathic.”
Some of mine were:
The interrotilde is used to denote an ‘n’ that is pronounced as “WHUUUUUU?”
The plural of ‘dracula’ is ‘CHRIST GET OUT OF THERE!’
Avoid using the letter G as it is unlucky.
Two days later, we were successfully entertaining 20,000 other people. Somehow this thing just took off like a shot, and we were getting follows and retweets like crazy. And if that weren’t enough, that’s about when the first publishing agent contacted us. The short version is: we are working with an agent and putting together a sample chapter for a proposed book that a number of publishers are interested in.
That, my friends, is crazy stupid.
We were semi-anonymous, in that the Fake AP was itself, and we were focusing on it, keeping it separate from our other stuff. Ken and Mark would happily tell people who asked whatever they wanted to know. A would-be “investigative reporter” “unmasked” us over at Wired’s website, and at that point we went ahead and admitted who we were. (Considering that we’re all a bunch of nobodies, it’s hard to say that there’s any difference between us being anonymous and us being outed.) The full list of contributors is here.
I’ll keep you posted with new developments. In the meantime, here are a couple of articles about the whole shebang:
Should “anal retentive” be hyphenated?
The Approval Matrix (we’re “brilliant” and “lowbrow”.)
@FakeAPStylebook Editors Explain Their Overnight Success on Twitter
and once more, the actual Twitter feed.
---Tags: internet_foolishness, ridiculousness, twitter
Very cool! Congrats!
Comment by Anne — November 4, 2009 @ 5:43 pm
[...] have an update on the FakeAPStylebook craziness. We (well, primarily Ken and Mark and the agent) sold our idea, and a book will be coming [...]
Pingback by Dave Ex Machina – A Thousand Points of Articulation » Typing in All Capital Letters is Perceived to be Shouting, so Only do it When Addressing Foreigners or the Elderly. — January 14, 2010 @ 4:50 pm
[...] Always Remember to Close All Parentheses. We’re Not Paying to Air Condition the Entire Paragraph. — The Rise and Rise of FakeAPStylebook! [...]
Pingback by Dave Ex Machina – A Thousand Points of Articulation » Eight — July 26, 2010 @ 2:24 pm