One of the weirder style sheet idiosyncrasies I’ve noticed in recent years is Slate’s use of superscript for ordinal suffixes—e.g., the “st” in “21st.”
That’s not the most gripping sentence to start a post with, but bear with me. As in Chinatown, where a few innocuous clues eventually lead to the discovery of a vast criminal conspiracy, this style sheet tic is the key that unlocks a sinister plot—and it has nothing to do with George W. Bush’s failure to fulfill his National Guard duties in the 1970s. Let’s start with this passage from a restaurant piece today by Inigo Thomas:
The conventional view is that a visitor to New York should get to know as many places as possible in the city, especially its restaurants, no matter how short their stay. … [But] you tend to see and hear more of New York if you go to one place again and again. Pick one saloon: Take, for example, the Café Loup on West 13th, between 6th and 7th. Here, you’re as likely to find interesting strangers who will tell you something of their New York as you are anywhere else. It’s an old Village hangout, once located further east, in the days when William Burroughs was a habitué.
I know of no respectable publication, print or online, that shares this style sheet tic. About the only place you can get away with using superscript ordinal suffixes these days is in signage and other graphic contexts. They would be bad enough in a print publication, but on the web they’re even worse: The conventions of page rendering mean that the superscripts force entire lines of text down and away from the lines above them, wreaking havoc on line spacing. It looks terrible, and there’s absolutely no justification for it. For footnote references, there’s probably no way around the problem, so it’s justified in those situations. But not for ordinal suffixes, which are never superscripted by any knowledgeable copy editor. What was Slate’s copy department thinking when it made this choice?
But all becomes clear when you consider Slate’s long association with Microsoft, the company that launched Slate and owned it for almost a decade before selling it to The Washington Post Company a few months ago. Microsoft has exasperated literate people for years with various seemingly arbitrary defaults built into Word, the most popular word processor on the planet. One of those seemingly arbitrary defaults is the superscripting of ordinal suffixes. A decision made long ago by some illiterate flunky at Microsoft has led much of the English-speaking world to believe that the superscripting of ordinal suffixes is not just okay, but standard.
Was Slate forced to follow some company-wide style sheet? Is there a shadowy Martin Stett figure deep within Microsoft who works to impose the company’s sinister copyediting rules on the rest of the world? Will Slate’s ordinal suffixes drop to the baseline now that they’re no longer propped up by the diabolical Bill Gates?
