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You're listening to Away With Words. I'm Martha Barnett.

And I'm Grant Barrett. These days, some of my favorite little bits of laughter come from the

fellows who run the Twitter account called Fake AP Stylebook.

Do you know this one, Martha?

Oh, boy, do I.

There they give their version of English usage advice for journalist in a send-up of the Stodgy

and the self-important-associated press.

Stodgy and self-important means it's another way of saying, ready for a takedown.

So they put things like advice like, the British spelling of color is blimey color I say, what ho.

Or Xerox is a trademarked name. Use butt duplicator.

I mean, because if AP style a guide takes itself so seriously, even on their own Twitter account, and just, I don't know, it's just begging for this kind of treatment.

One other bit of advice from the fake AP style book guys is it's inappropriate to bluntly state how dumb your city's kids are, just hope readers understand what underperforming means.

And so they're also speaking kind of truth about the tiredness of some types of journalism,

aren't they?

Yeah, yeah.

And everybody I know turns to the AP Stylebook as this Bible of style book as this Bible of style and usage.

One of my favorite tweets from them was,

...