As soon as I sit down at my home computer, our cat EC jumps onto the desk and tiptoes across the keyboard. Thinking about EC and our other cat, LC, I realized that I never use periods in their names even though the letters are initials standing for Elie’s cat and Lesley’s cat, designations our veterinarian friend gave them when she earmarked the orphaned kittens for us.

What are the rules for using periods with initials? Some publications use them for all abbreviations—N.A.S.A., S.A.T., A.I.D.S., I.O.U. Others use periods if the letters are individually pronounced as letters (V.I.P., for instance) but not if the letters are pronounced as a word, such as NASA and AIDS.

At National Geographic we have eliminated periods from many abbreviations and acronyms (MIT, UCLA, NGS, UN, NASA, FBI, CD-ROM, TV, VCR, GI, ABCs,). For personal initials, we omit periods from three-letter designations such as LBJ and FDR, but when using initials with a spelled-out last name, we keep the periods ( E. B. White). We also keep them in the two-letter designation for the other President Roosevelt: T. R. And we retain them in abbreviations of geographic place-names (U.S., P.R.C., U.A.E.) and for a few other abbreviations, such as Ph.D. and M.D.

We use a period on Harry S. Truman’s middle initial because of a 1975 explanation from the Harry S. Truman Library. (Truman, himself, used a period in some instances, though not in others.) On the other hand we eliminate periods from the name of W J McGee, an early National Geographic President, because that’s what he did.

The trend today is toward cleaner, more straightforward copy. In other words fewer fussy marks of punctuation. The new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style omits periods with capital-letter abbreviations such as AD and BC, USA, and CEO, although it still prefers periods with abbreviations that appear in lowercase—a.m., a.k.a. (At the Geographic, we write CEO and aka without periods, but A.D., B.C., U.S.A. with periods.)

Perhaps the reason I don’t use periods with my cats’ names is that I’ve been influenced by this trend toward less punctuation. Or could it also be because in my mind I don’t see them as initials at all. I don’t see EC and LC, but rather “Ici” and “Elsie.” Poor boys—they're stuck with ambiguous initials because the family simply could not agree on real names!

By now many of you interested in grammar and word usage have read about the new sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which has managed to eliminate some 16,000 hyphens out of 600,000 entries. That small, horizontal mark of punctuation has become dispensable in the modern world of text messaging.

Decades ago, when I first started paying attention to hyphens, the National Geographic freely distributed them in text. Almost every compound modifier except for a few well-established terms, such as real estate, required a hyphen. Even a phrase such as “the black-and-white kitten” demanded hyphens despite the fact that with a singular kitten there could be absolutely no confusion about the cat’s color. With more than one cat, it is not so clear: “Black-and-white kittens” means each cat is a mix of black and white; “black and white kittens” means some are white, others are black.

In the 1970s we had passionate debates about hyphenating high-school student; we certainly would not want our readers to think the pages of National Geographic referred to students high on drugs, and so for years we used a hyphen. We used a hyphen in resting-place, because that’s what Webster’s unabridged did. Of course, if you looked up the term in the collegiate edition, you wouldn’t find it, leading you to think it should be two words. I finally decreed we would eliminate the hyphen in both terms, using them both as two words.

More recently we took the plunge on goodbye, and then on online, email, and website, closing them up as one word. And we’ve consistently cut back on hyphens in compound modifiers, using them only when we feel there might be confusion—and, wow, can that be subjective. One general rule is that if a compound modifier is listed in Webster’s as a noun, it is familiar enough to readers to be used as a modifier without a hyphen. We especially do not hyphenate compound animal names: polar bear habitat, killer whale prey, bald eagle nests.

That brings me to an article in the New York Times, which points out the distinction between a “slippery-eel salesman” and a “slippery eel salesman.” The first sells slippery eels; the second is a slightly dishonest seller of eels. See the power of that one small speck of type—at least for those who understand hyphens.