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!

Comments