Yeah, some days you feel exactly like this. Like today, only I wish it were my laptop, not an old-school printer. Grrrrrr.

I’m not making this up. I promise.

As any writer or editor worth his or her stylebook understands, the phrase “third party” is sometimes used as a noun and sometimes used as a compound adjective.

Noun: “That website is owned by a third party.”

Compound adjective: “That there is a third-party website.”

About as simple as it gets, right?

With all due respect to my daughter, who is finishing up her first year at Villanova law school: not to lawyers, it’s not.

At least not to the lawyers who reviewed the following text:

You are going to a third–party website that [company redacted] does not control. The website is governed by the third party’s posted privacy policy and terms of use, and the third party is solely responsible for the content, offerings and level of security presented on its website.

The lawyers called for the removal of the hyphen in the first sentence.

The writer responded with this: “We’d prefer to abide by the grammatical rule of using a hyphen when two essentially separate words are modifying a noun.”

The lawyer responded: “No objection to leaving the hyphen, but then add the hyphen to all the ‘third party’ references that did not have the hyphen.”

This is the sort of thing that helps give lawyers a bad name.

The AP Stylebook has added a few new entries. Among them is “modified tweets” which is noted as “a tweet amended before forwarding uses the abbreviation MT.” (I wonder if the New York Times still has a ban on the word “tweet.”)

Also added: cloud (the collection of data and use of related computing services via remote servers accessed through the Internet), direct message (“a personal message sent via Twitter to one of your followers. DMs differ from mentions and @ replies in that they can only be seen by the sender and recipient,” though I’m not sure why a direct message is relevant only to Twitter), and scraping or mirroring (“the method of copying video, photo or audio content from an account and reposting it to a different one”).

My hatred of “air quotes” is well documented. When it comes to a collection of bad air quotes, does it get any “better” than this? I “doubt” it.

Simply stunning. Read more about it over here.