A parody Twitter account for the Chicago Manual of Style exists, and while so far it’s only coughed up two tweets, the elements of a funny fake account are there:
5.11 Gender: Nouns may be masculine, feminine, or neuter. In the dative case, they can be downright promiscuous.
— Fake CMoS (@FakeCMoS) April 22, 2012
The numbers, the knowing tone — scrub a little of the Dorothy Parker aspiration and make a few optical spacing jokes (19.22), and this bad boy could take off. It seems unlikely that any stylebook parody could scale the heights Mark Hale and Ken Lowery’s Fake AP Stylebook has — a book deal, flattering profiles (1, 2) — but who knows?
The Fake AP Stylebook account got the AP’s more buttoned-up official product to lighten up; witness this amazing exchange from mid-February about Valentines’ Day:
I’ve contacted the Chicago Manual of Style to see whether and how it’s prepared to respond to this assault on its good name.
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