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Rona Maynard's avatar

What a lively excursion through literary and sporting initials. One for your collection: the great memoirist and food writer Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, who made her name as M.F.K. Fisher. Among her many quotable lines: "The purpose of living is to get old enough to have something to say."

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Lynn Childress's avatar

The use of initials is a nightmare for copyeditors. Some publishers (for consistency) required that all the names in the Bibliography be changed to initials if one of the authors listed had initials. If a mixture of initials and full names was allowed, then figuring out how to list these alphabetically (by initials or full name) had to be resolved and often the full names had to be looked up. In the text, you had to confirm that the gender of the person with only initials was correct (more things to look up). If the initials were in lower case, it was very challenging because someone in the publishing process would think it was a mistake and make them upper case. And what do you do about the rule that says that full names should be given the first time a name is mentioned? Does T. S. Eliot count as a full name?

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