Q. With the new rule for the en dash and personal names (CMOS 6.85), does that mean a city like Winston-Salem will be spelled with an en dash now?

A. That’s a good question, but the new rule does not extend to a place-name like Winston-Salem. Nor would it extend to a name like Merriam-Webster (the dictionary publisher). Such names are like the hyphenated surname Newton-John in the name Olivia Newton-John. Though each of those three names (of the city, the publisher, and the person) combines two names, they’re each considered to be a single hyphenated unit.

The en dash in a term like “Epstein–Barr virus” or “Ali–Frazier fight,” by contrast, is supposed to help clarify that something (as a virus or a fight) is being attributed to two people rather than just one. A Winston-Salem virus or Winston-Salem fight, on the other hand, would be a virus or a fight named for a single city in North Carolina—one that happens to have a double-barreled (and hyphenated) name.

Note, however, that the names of some places would get an en dash in Chicago style: for example, Minneapolis–Saint Paul, where the dash connects to an open compound (see also CMOS 6.86).

Q. Hi CMOS, I have a (possibly silly) question. Would the phrase “dogs have a tail” be considered grammatically correct? My instinct is that it should be “dogs have tails,” with both nouns plural. On the other hand, there are some contexts where “dogs have a tail” sounds fine, at least to my ear. For example, if someone asked you what the difference is between dogs and frogs, you might say, “for one thing, dogs have a tail.” Is this a quirk of spoken English vs. written English? This is a trivial example, but this issue comes up a lot in the scientific writing I edit. If it’s purely a personal style choice, I’d prefer to stick with the authors’ original wording. Wordings? Thanks!

A. Though some dogs can be silly, your question isn’t silly at all. One problem is that either statement—dogs have a tail and dogs have tails—could be ambiguous if taken literally. The first could mean that dogs as a group share one tail, and the second could mean that dogs each have more than one tail.

But it’s common knowledge that the animal known as a dog normally has only one tail, so you can follow your instincts (which are correct in this case, grammatically speaking) and match plural subject with plural object: dogs have tails. Use a singular object only when the plural might be misunderstood (unlikely with dogs and tails), or when the fact that the object is singular is the point—as in most dogs have only one tail.

This advice applies equally to writing and speaking, but you’re probably right to suggest that a singular object would be more common in speech than in edited prose. For more on this type of construction, known as the distributive possessive, see CMOS 5.25.

Q. In CMOS 8.117, why are Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Polar Lander not italicized? Aren’t they the names of specific spacecraft?

A. Italics are normally reserved for creative as opposed to descriptive names. Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Polar Lander are the names of specific vehicles launched by NASA, but they’re both based on generic descriptions: The first name refers to a spacecraft that was launched to do a global survey of Mars (while orbiting that planet), and the second names a spacecraft designed to explore the south polar region of that same planet (after having landed on its surface).

Phoenix also refers to a specific spacecraft that was sent to Mars, but “Phoenix” is a name, not a description, so it gets italics (including when used with a generic description, as in “NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander”).

Trivia: Though italics for names are now usually limited to ships and other named vessels, it was once relatively common to find the names of people and places in italics, as in two influential eighteenth-century English novels: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (vol. 4, London, 1742, via Internet Archive) and Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (vol. 1, 1749, via HathiTrust).

Q. Hello! In the examples in CMOS 8.48, can you clarify why Southern California, Northern California, West Tennessee, East Tennessee, and Middle Tennessee get capitalized, whereas western Arizona, eastern Massachusetts, southern Minnesota, northwest Illinois, and central Illinois do not?

A. Southern California and Northern California are capitalized because they have become recognized beyond their borders as the names of two geographic and cultural entities. East, West, and Middle Tennessee are capitalized as the names of the three “grand divisions” in that state, a usage that has become widely accepted; see, among other sources, the entry for “Tennessee” in Britannica. (Many sources style these as the Grand Divisions—with initial capitals—including this page from the Tennessee Historical Society. Tennessee’s state constitution, on the other hand, uses lowercase, and it doesn’t name the three divisions.)

As for the other examples in your question, each of those is more likely to be used generically (i.e., to refer to the western or other portion of a state) rather than as a proper noun. And though any of them might be capitalized in local usage (as in a travel guide extolling the virtues of a certain region), such usage shouldn’t necessarily determine your own (or that of your author). When in doubt, use lowercase for terms like western at the state level and caps for national or global regions.

Q. Would you use a comma after the verb read in fiction when written text is introduced by that word? Does it matter whether the text is presented as a sentence? For example,

The sign read Keep Out.

versus

The sign read, “Thank you for not smoking.”

As a copyeditor I am always unsure whether read is considered a variation of such terms as said, replied, asked, wrote, or the like. Perhaps I must consider whether the grammar and syntax of the quoted material is separate from the text that introduces it?

A. You don’t normally need a comma before words introduced by the verb read—or said, for that matter—used in the sense of “consisted of (or included) the word(s).” And though quotation marks are helpful in some cases, they can usually be omitted in favor of title case for shorter signs (see CMOS 7.64):

The sign read “Thank you for not smoking.”

or

The sign read Thank You for Not Smoking.

Use a comma only in the rare event that read is used as a speech tag (in which case the quoted words would be considered to be syntactically independent relative to the surrounding sentence; see CMOS 12.14):

I asked, “Could you tell me what that sign says?”

Squinting through the haze, she read, “ ‘Thank you for not smoking.’ ”

Note the nested single quotation marks, which clarify that the quoted speaker is quoting something in turn (see also CMOS 12.46 and 6.11).

Q. Why do you use a colon to separate page numbers in a journal article citation but a comma to separate page numbers in most everything else? It seems completely nonsensical.

A. You’re right, a comma might make more sense. Somewhere along the line, however, the idea that a colon should come between a volume and page number morphed into Chicago’s current journal citation style. The following example, from the Botanical Gazette, appeared in the first ten editions of the Manual (the 1 in parentheses was used to mark the first of two examples by the same author):

LIVINGSTON, B. E., (1) On the nature of the stimulus which causes the change in form of polymorphic green algae. BOT. GAZ. 30:289–317. 1900.

That was offered not as an example of Chicago style but of Gazette style. Today, that same article can be found on the website of the International Journal of Plant Sciences (which continues the Gazette, a journal that got its start in 1876) and would be cited in modern Chicago style as follows:

Livingston, Burton Edward. “On the Nature of the Stimulus Which Causes the Change of Form in Polymorphic Green Algæ.” Botanical Gazette 30, no. 5 (1900): 289–317. https://doi.org/10.1086/328048.

An issue number and date now intervene between volume number and page range, but that colon nonetheless became Chicago style for citing journal articles, starting with the 12th edition (published in 1969). That was also the first edition to prefer Arabic rather than Roman numerals for volume numbers (the Gazette example was an exception to this rule in earlier editions), which may have factored into the decision. A colon remains Chicago style for referring to a volume and page number alone, as in “2:37” (for vol. 2, p. 37); see CMOS 14.74. Older Chicago style would have called for “II, 37” (with a Roman numeral and a comma, as in the 10th ed., ¶ 253).

The editors of the 12th edition could have specified a comma whenever a year or other number intervenes between volume and page numbers (as is the case for most journal article citations), but they didn’t. More than fifty years later, our editors have come to think of that colon as a helpful little sign that says journal article.