The Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style : A ...

16 an
ately after noon to immediately before
midnight.
In referring to the stroke of 12, you
can say 12 noon or 12 midnight, or just
noon or midnight. To avoid confusion,
do not abbreviate. Sometimes “12 M.”
(meridian) is used for noon and “12
P.M.” for midnight. But the “M.” can be
misinterpreted as an abbreviation of
“midnight” and people may not know
what to make of the “P.M.”
Midnight ends a day. So “midnight
Wednesday” is the end of Wednesday,
not the beginning of Thursday.
A.M. and P.M. are spelled also with
lower-case letters (a.m., p.m. or a.m.,
p.m.) or small capitals (A.M., P.M.).
AN. See A and AN.
Anachronism. 1. Historical revision.
2. Illogical captions. 3. Retroactive retitling.
4. Untrue dialogue.
1. Historical revision
In 1867 Secretary of State William H.
Seward signed a treaty “to purchase
Alaska from the Soviet Union”—at least
that is what the hostess on a national radio
show said (111 years later). Various
commentators have called Seward ahead
of his time; he would have had to be fifty
years ahead to deal with the Soviet
Union, which came into existence in
1917. The treaty was with Russia.
That is an example of an anachronism,
a verbal or graphic misplacement
in time, a chronological error. Chronology
shares with anachronism the root
khronos, Greek for time. (Ana- means
backward.) Sometimes anachronism is
used erroneously in place of anomaly or
contradiction, but time is the key.
We are concerned here mainly with
the distortion of history by the intrusion
of things that came later, particularly
names, terms, and expressions. Anachronisms
are inevitable in fiction representing
the future: 1984 turned out
differently from 1984 (a fact that does
not detract from the eminence of Orwell’s
book).
An almanac anachronistically stated
that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
was “founded in 1862.” It was so
named in 1953 as a new identity for the
Bureau of Internal Revenue. A television
interviewee said Al Capone, the gangster,
was arrested for “IRS violations.” Make
it tax violations. Capone died in 1947.
This statement was made in a TV documentary
about the search for the missing
link by archaeologists in Africa:
Tools were first recognized by Louis
Leakey, when he came to this remote
corner of Tanzania in 1931.
Leakey went to Tanganyika. Tanzania
was formed in 1964 (from the union of
Tanganyika and Zanzibar).
2. Illogical captions
Captions of photographs published in
the popular press are apt to juxtapose
past and present illogically, as this caption
in a Sunday paper does:
UNDER THE GAZE of a mannequin
Saturday, Steve C—— . . . tries salmon
sausage . . . at the Pittsburg
Seafood Festival, which continues today.
“Saturday,” yesterday, he “tries” it?
“Tries” should be tried. The writer has
forced upon the present tense the impossible
task of representing the past as well
as the present (the festival “continues today”).
Having set an action in the past, a
sentence cannot bring in the present
tense to represent that action.
To write that “strawberries await
buyers Thursday at Whole Foods market
. . .” would normally imply that buyers
could expect them next Thursday. But
the quotation is the caption of a picture
taken yesterday, Thursday, and pub-