all I really need to know I read in the AP stylebook

New truths for today:

1."Do not follow an organization's full name with an abbreviation or acronym in parentheses." I am guilty of this.

2. "Amendments, ordinances, resolutions and rules are adopted or approved. Bills are passed. Laws are enacted."

3. "Air Force Base" should not be abbreviated in datelines, so they write in 1987. I'm pretty sure that got changed.

4. "Another is not a synonym for additional; it refers to an element that somehow duplicates a previously stated quantity."

5. April Fools' Day should have an apostrophe. I think I have advocated against it in the past.

6. "Legally, however, assault means simply to threaten violence, as in pointing a pistol at an individual without firing it."

7. "The phrase (average of) takes a plural verb in a construction such as: An average of 100 new jobs are created daily." I can feel this one both ways.

**It is a sad, sad thing to say that The Journalist's Bible is fallible -- or at least it was in 1987.

How would it feel to know 700,000 copies of your baby, the stylebook you created, are in print, and that it contains ERRORS? I wouldn't know how to live with myself. At least in the A section, there is not a standard number of spaces between entries. The entry for "association" unnecessarily begins with a capital letter.

And I found part of the "affect, effect" entry amusing:

"Affect, as a noun, is best avoided. It occasionally is used in psychology to describe an emotion, but there is no need for it in everyday language."