Here’s a grammar question from the city of Denver. Is ‘council member’ one word or two? Sometimes, even a style guide can’t help much.
I talk a good bit about The Associated Press Stylebook and its AP Style because in my real job, it’s the style guide I use. Organizations often adopt a style guide for consistency’s sake. Most newsrooms rely on AP Style for consistency when they share stories across multiple outlets. But different style guides sometimes conflict. The question of whether you should write council member or councilmember stands as a good example.
As hard as it may be to believe, the city of Denver, Colorado, actually brought up the question on its own website.
AP Style prefers gender-neutral language, so it suggests member rather than words like councilman or councilwoman. But the gender-specific forms are written as one word.
Council member, AP’s good book says, is written as two words. But Denver’s post states that AP Style adds this little conundrum:
Councilmember is acceptable in jurisdictions that have adopted the one-word version.
It’s a good example of those of us who like the consistency a style guide provides having to remain inconsistent to fall in line with local jurisdictions.
It’s not as though copyediting isn’t challenging enough just catching the spelling and grammar errors that are already there. With glitches like this, those of us who copyedit as part of our jobs also have to be on the lookout for curious little usage quandaries like this.
So what does Denver say?
For journalists covering the goings-on in Denver, they might expect the answer would be simple since the city itself brought up the question.
It isn’t. The city and county’s style guide doesn’t specify one over the other. The city’s charter spells it as two words six times and as one word 17 times. But a wider search that includes “ordinances, agendas, minutes, proclamations, and resolutions,” finds councilmember 1,781 times and council member 10,890 times.
“This clearly means Denver hasn’t adopted anything officially,” their page states.
It also clearly suggests, however, that they seem to prefer the two-word version based on frequency alone.
It also suggests that when the title comes before the name, as in “Council member John Doe,” you should capitalize the C but not the M. Generally, you capitalize titles before a name. You might expect to capitalize both words since they’re a two-word title.
It gets more complicated the more you look
Here in South Carolina, I double-checked Charleston’s use of titles for members of council — both city and county.
The city’s website refers to councilmembers for Charleston City Council. The County’s website lists its council members for Charleston County Council.
In neighboring Berkeley County, it gets even more sticky: Berkeley County’s website prefers councilmembers. Its county seat, Moncks Corner, however, prefers the gender-specific councilman and councilwoman titles. AP Style, for the record, says to use gender-neutral versions “unless the -man or -woman titles are specified by an organization.”
It’d be nice if everyone could just pick one and run with it. But in this day of the political divide, there might not be much of anything of a political nature that anyone will ever agree on.
Until such a day occurs, the best we can do is see what an individual municipality chooses and follow that lead.