Manuscript Preparation, Copyediting, and Proofreading

Q. I work at a university press, and during a meeting of project editors we had a disagreement about the correct placement of the glossary. CMOS recommends that the glossary appear between the notes and bibliography. Although we’ll accept this as your final answer, our question is why? Thank you!

A. Like many of the rules in CMOS, this one was begotten lo those many years ago. In an early edition of the manual, the glossary was placed just so, and then that edition begat the next. The next edition begat the following one, and the following one begat the one after, and so on down unto these very days. Obviously, someone at the dawn of time thought it was a good idea, and no one in all the generations since has found reason to mess with it. And so that is why.