Several hundred copy editors descended on Providence, Rhode Island, this past weekend for the annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society (ACES), now trending on Twitter as #ACES2019. (We can dream, can’t we?) If you have ever been a copy editor among copy editors, you know the joy of being in the company of your fellow-nerds, and hearing them speak out loud of things that normally stay inside your head: arguments about the singular “they,” musings about whether to capitalize a proper name that begins with a lowercase letter (d’Anjou, for instance) if it occurs at the beginning of a sentence. (I say yes, but perhaps I am insensitive.) When I first became aware of ACES, in 2014, the organization was holding its conference in Las Vegas, and I pictured copy editors at play, pulling the arms of slot machines that featured rows of commas instead of cherries. At this year’s opening reception, the entertainment was a pencil embosser—both a machine and a man feeding it handfuls of pencils, which came out saying things like “I THINK, THEREFORE I EDIT.”

A New Yorker copy editor is at a disadvantage at ACES. It is hard to defend some of the magazine’s Anglican ways—the spelling of “theatre,” the double consonants in, say, “traveller,” which we have to protect vigilantly from the ravages of spell-check—while also favoring the great American dictionary handed down to us on tablets from Noah Webster. Many eccentricities of New Yorker style are so old and ingrained that there is no longer anyone alive who remembers the reason for them. Why do we hyphenate “teen-ager”? In Web II—Webster’s unabridged New International Dictionary, Second Edition, published back in the thirties—you’ll find “teenage” as one word, but the definition is “brushwood used for fences and hedges” (from teen, a variant of “tine,” to enclose), and its final syllable is pronounced with a schwa, as in “tonnage.”

Readers today are unlikely to confuse an adolescent with an armload of brushwood used for fences and hedges. Still, the magazine’s copy editors dutifully hyphenate “teen-ager” even as we half-heartedly enforce the ban on “balding”—the editor William Shawn preferred “partly or partially bald”—without knowing exactly what is wrong with it. “To bald” may not be a common intransitive verb, but that has not prevented “balding” from entering the language as a participle. Personally, I think the practice might have its origins in sensitivity on the part of Mr. Shawn, who was partially bald. The definition in Web II is cruel: “Destitute of the natural or common covering of hair on the head.” Perhaps he was in denial about the progressive tendency of hair loss: just because one is partly bald doesn’t mean one is necessarily destined to end up destitute.

ACES was originally an organization of newspaper copy editors, a dwindling breed whose members are more and more likely to be self-employed. Many professionals return to ACES in the spring. Mark Allen, a freelancer who devotes a lot of energy to bringing up young copy editors, flew in from Ohio. Merrill Perlman, who for years was a mainstay of copy desks at the Times (she also leads tours of Central Park), hovered over the silent auction. John McIntyre, a magisterial presence in black suit and bow tie, with distinctive white plumage, confided that, having been fired from and then rehired by the Baltimore Sun, he had recently been reassigned to the paper’s online edition. Peter Sokolowski, with his bold eyebrows and undeniably smooth and shapely head, is the face of Merriam-Webster. He acted as the pronouncer for the spelling bee on ACES Eve (I was the first to be eliminated—yay!) and conducted an interview with Benjamin Dreyer, the author of the phenomenally successful new style guide “Dreyer’s English.” Sokolowski also presided over a panel of style-guide superstars, but it was so crowded I couldn’t get in. I bided my time picking up swag from the sponsors. Grammar Table had moved from its usual location, in Verdi Square on the Upper West Side, where its founder, Ellen Jovin, takes questions from passersby, to a perch in a hall of booths staffed by the people from the Chicago Manual of Style, our friends from Editors Canada, who practice a style that is a unique blend of British and American usage, and the A.P. (Associated Press). The most popular item of swag at ACES is A.P. lip balm.

The conference offers dozens of sessions, on everything from gender consciousness to “Bad English,” in which James Harbeck, a freelance editor based in Toronto, showed how “Fifty Shades of Grey” had been put through one of the sites competing for your grammar dollars, and demonstrated that eliminating redundancy does not improve pornography. But the centerpiece of the weekend is the session at which the A.P. announces changes to its annual style guide. It was standing room only in Narragansett A as Paula Froke, the lead editor of the A.P. Stylebook, ran through her slides. There were guidelines on race—whether a subject is black or white need not be reported unless it’s pertinent to the story—and updates on recreational marijuana (pot or cannabis on second reference; employees at dispensaries are budtenders). A cheer went up when Froke announced that “split forms” are acceptable—most copy editors have long since stopped worrying about the split infinitive, but now we are good “to boldly go” where the English language has been going for centuries. Another cheer went up at the news that “data” takes a singular verb and pronoun (except in academic and scientific papers). A slide that said “Percent, Percentage” was greeted with a roar. From now on, the A.P. will use the percent sign after a numeral instead of writing out “percent” or “percentage.” Although 99.5% of those present approved, no publication is obligated to follow A.P. style. The New Yorker still spells out “per cent” and even makes it two words.

You could feel the excitement in the room when a slide appeared with the heading “HYPHENS!” The A.P. is dropping the hyphen in such terms as “African American,” “Asian American,” and “Filipino American.” Froke credited this change to the eloquence of Henry Fuhrmann, formerly the copy chief of the L.A. Times, who wrote, “Those hyphens serve to divide even as they are meant to connect. Their use in racial and ethnic identifiers can connote an otherness, a sense that people of color are somehow not full citizens or fully American.” Fuhrmann, an American copy editor and a beloved ACES veteran, whose father was of German and Danish descent and whose mother was Japanese, received an ovation.

More hyphen news: in the interest of preventing clutter, the A.P. will drop the little bugger from such compounds as “third-grade teacher” and “chocolate-chip cookie.” The purpose of the hyphen is clarity: because there is no danger in mistaking which two words go together (it’s not “gradeteacher” or “chipcookie”), the extra mark is unnecessary. “The fewer hyphens the better,” Froke declared. There are also new guidelines on “suspensive hyphenation” (don’t ask) and on compound adjectives formed with “well” (well known, well fed, well dressed), which are hyphenated before the noun but not after. (The New Yorker was ahead of the curve on this one.) One final item: the hyphen has been removed from double-“E” combinations, such as “preeclampsia,” “preelection,” “preeminent,” “preempt,” “reenter,” etc. If you find these difficult to read, The New Yorker has a solution: next year, consider the diaeresis.