This article analyzes the changing prescriptive aims of the New York Times style guide from 1923 to 2015. While the editors of the style guide are not always explicit about the political pressures that result in changes from one edition to the next, the development of the entries throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries demonstrates the power of standard language ideology at work. By tracing the changing prescriptions over the decades, this study highlights the complicated but important nature of the politics of prescriptivism.
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Copyright 2025 by the American Dialect Society
2025
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