Language Mavens, this is for you:  The trend in print these days seems
to be to delete the old style comma before names ending in Jr. or Sr. 
I did a search of assorted grammar websites and found most say to drop
the comma, although there are still some purists that say to keep it. 
But WHY did the comma get dropped?  One Chicago style guide website
said this goes back to 1993, but doesn't say why.  An informal survey
of people I know found that a famous book publisher still uses the
comma, DETAILS Magazine does not, the NEW YORK TIMES does not.  Is
there a "definitive" judgment on the subject. . .or at least, an
explanation of why it got dropped?  I feel like something happened
when I wasn't looking and nobody told me.

<As you indicate in your question, the use of a comma before Jr and Sr
was revised in the Chicago Style Guide in 1993. The reason for this
was to make a consistent rule for the writing of names. Previously
Roman numerals to differentiate one individual from another were not
preceded by a comma whereas titles like Jr. or Sr. were. So you
previously had:
Thomas H. Wright, Jr. (with comma)
W. James Hart III (without comma)

The new style guide means they are now written as follows:
Thomas H. Wright Jr. (without comma)
W. James Hart III (without comma)

The changes are described at
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/News/manual_of_style.html. The section
titled Chapter 8 explains the change as follows:
‘In differentiating male members of the same family who have identical
names, the tradition of setting off Jr. and Sr. with commas while
roman numeral designations are not is now given second place to the
preferable practice of omitting commas in all such cases.’

The grammar doctor (a former teacher of English) at
http://www.geocities.com/grammardoc5/jr.html states that both forms of
punctuation, with or without the comma, are acceptable.

Whether or not the comma is used depends on the style that a
particular publisher chooses to use. Often publishers will produce
their own style guide or have a policy of adhering to a particular
style like the Chicago Style Guide or Elements of Style. In Elements
of Style it is recommended that the comma before Jr. or Sr. should be
used. It is therefore advisable to check the requirements of your
publisher.>

<Additional links:>

<Elements of style.>
<http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk.html>


<Search strategy:>

< chicago style guide 1993 jr changes>
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=chicago+style+guide+1993+jr&as_q=changes

<jr punctuation>
<://www.google.com/search?q=jr+punctuation&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=10&sa=N>


<Hope this helps.>

---

Request for Answer Clarification by cryptica-ga on 20 Mar 2003 10:50 PST

Belindalevez-ga-

I don't mean to be difficult, but you have essentially told me what I
already said in my query -- including quoting from one of the sources
* I * quoted. I was hoping for a more thorough answer, delving deeper
than these quick link grabs.  I did those already.  If you are saying
there IS no further research to uncover on the subject, I guess I will
accept it.   Let me know.

---

Clarification of Answer by belindalevez-ga on 20 Mar 2003 12:43 PST

Despite an extensive search there appears to be no other reason for
changing the rule about the comma than the reason given in my answer.
According to the forward of the book at
http://btobsearch.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?userid=2VYAD66ZTA&btob=Y&ean=9780226103891&pwb=1&displayonly=PRF#PRF
the Chicago Manual of Style aims to record the rules of English. Other
books like Elements of Style also try to do the same. Although they
agree on most rules, there are some differences in the way that they
think English should be written.

This subject is discussed in an interesting article at
http://owlcroft.com/english/prescrip.html. It provides an insight into
the making of rules in English and the current state of the English
language. It explains that there are lots of guides telling us what is
correct and incorrect English. There are also those who seek to
simplify English. However ultimately we are free to speak and write
English without being bound by rules.

---

Request for Answer Clarification by cryptica-ga on 20 Mar 2003 16:14 PST

Thank you, PinkF & Voila for the added insights.  I realize you did
answer my question in a literal way, Belindalevez, but I don't want to
close it out yet with a rating because there still seems to be
interest in the subject and some wider range of ideas about it coming
in.  This trend of no comma biz has immediately influenced me. . .I'm
a TV producer and today, for an interview with Cuba Gooding Jr. that
we're about to air, we took the comma out of his screen I.D.  It felt
strange to do it!

This is a fascinating question! 

Where is William Safire now that we need him? ;-)

Here is my take on the matter: I used to work in a state government
office where we maintained databanks of our clients. During data entry
of the clients' information, we could not use a comma in any of the
data fields, since commas were reserved as "delimiters" which divided
one data field from the next. We placed the Jr (sans period, too) in
the same field with the surname, then followed with the first name and
middle initial, if any. William F. Buckley, Jr. become the three data
entries "Buckley Jr" "William" and "F".

I believe that commas are used as delimiters in many fields of
business, as well. Perhaps the widespread habit of omitting the commas
during data entry influenced publication style guides, since many
folks became accustomed to seeing "Jr." and "Sr." without the
customary comma.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. ;-)

Hi cryptica,

I think this punctuational phenomena has more to do with the overall
open v. close style of punctuation of which the 14th Ed. Chicago
Manual of Style published in 1993 set the standard.  Maybe the larger
question would be who started the push toward the more contemporary
open style?

*open style of punctuation-using only the punctuation necessary to
prevent misreading
*close style of punctuation-using all punctuation that the grammatical
structure will allow

http://www.cs.wcu.edu/res/nasa_sp7084/sp7084glos.html

Just guessing here, but I think the internet had quite a bit to do
with it, along with our trend toward informality across the board.

Individual preference:
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~opa/pubs/ed_style_guide/names.html

Use only in business correspondence:
http://www.mwc.edu/crel/media/punctuation.htm

I'll try to get back to this since it's such an interesting question.

Here's an example of pinkie's "delimiters" as they pertain to ASCII
file databases and spreadsheets:
http://tinyurl.com/7vop (redirect)

And here are some instances in the biblabel and citesub departments:
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/biblabel/biblabel-0.04.html

It might be a combination of several things reaching critical mass,
but this looks to be more of a personal choice than a hard and fast
rule (see the biblabel document regarding author, Guy L. Steele Jr.'s
preference).

I'll make a couple calls tomorrow and see if I can nail it down any
further.  If you don't have this link already, it might come in handy.
http://www.journaliststoolbox.com/newswriting/copyeditors.html

So pinkfreud-ga, if I change my name to "," or ";-)" I'll disappear
from every government database?

Spurious,

Perhaps if you change your name to ":-D" you will disappear as the
Cheshire Cat did, and leave the grin behind.

~Pink

Hello again cryptica,

Unfortunately a call to my local library was less than fruitful, so
I'll have to speculate a bit on why and when this occurred.  I do feel
that the impetus for change in the Chicago Manual of Style occurred
with the implementation of the Unicode Standard, so if we could work
backwards from 1993.

1993:  Chicago Manual of Style, Ed. 14, formally adopts open style
punctuation.

***********

1991:  Unicode Consortium founded.

"Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters
and other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before
Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding
systems for assigning these numbers. No single encoding could contain
enough characters: for example, the European Union alone requires
several different encodings to cover all its languages. Even for a
single language like English no single encoding was adequate for all
the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use.

These encoding systems also conflict with one another. That is, two
encodings can use the same number for two different characters, or use
different numbers for the same character. Any given computer
(especially servers) needs to support many different encodings; yet
whenever data is passed between different encodings or platforms, that
data always runs the risk of corruption."

***********

Mid-1970s:  Wide-body ASCII (precursor to Unicode)
Source document:  http://www.unicode.org/history/Unicode88.pdf
Punctuation addressed:  http://www.unicode.org/book/ch06.pdf

"Punctuation, which may be more critical to communicating meaning than
spelling, provokes much less strong social attitudes - perhaps because
nonstandard forms are less obvious, perhaps because punctuation has no
defining moment like the publication of Johnson's dictionary, but has
evolved gradually and has standard forms but is open to change.

Since any new international/multilingual text encoding will inevitably
require explicit conversion to/from existing encodings, this fact
might as well be viewed as an opportunity.  Within the bounds of
"conversion-compatibility," it releases new designs from the need for
strict conformity with designs of the past.  With luck, the future of
computing and electronic communications will be longer than the past. 
A text encoding design with hopes of serving the 199s and perhaps the
21st century, should be engineered to best serve the future, not the
past."

***********

1970-71:  Advent of word processing.  Introduction of open style
punctuation.
http://www.bradford.ac.uk/acad/civeng/skills/punctuan.htm

"Full Stops (.)
1 Full stops are used to divide sentence from sentence. 

2 They are also placed at the end of abbreviated words, 
e.g., Hon. Sec.,; Dr.; Nos. 1-5, though it is worth noting that with
the advent of word processing open punctuation is now widely used. For
example: eg Dr Smith etc."

***********

1969:  Introduction of IBM System/3 model 10, introducing 96 columns
card multifunction device.
http://perso.club-internet.fr/febcm/english/information_technology/information_technology_3.htm

***********

1950s:  Advent of keypunch. 
http://perso.club-internet.fr/febcm/english/information_technology/information_technology_2.htm

***********

Language changes in English:
http://www.shunsley.eril.net/armoore/lang/change.htm


***********

As you can see from the above timeline, there's about a 20-year lag in
technology to mass acceptance of those changes.  As such, there is no
*one* defining moment when your "Jr." example happened -- rather a
gradual evolution and culmination of several forces at work.  Language
purists, however, may *never* accept these changes.  If you add in the
loosey-goosey style of email/IM, you see a veritable wild west show of
grammar and punctuation, but it's always good to be grounded in the
basics.

Bottomline, your question is a personal style choice, so I would ask
your subject how he prefers to see his name in print. One way is
neither right, nor wrong.

I found most of this information using the search words "advent" and
"open punctuation" and traced the rest through leads from those eight
documents.  Hope this is helpful to you.  It was fun to do. 
Seriously.  I know, I'm a sick woman.

://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22advent%22+%22open+punctuation%22

Cheers,
V

Voila --
You may be a sick woman, but you're MY kind of sick woman.  I love
that
you've really been pursuing this.  I'm going to post a "For Voila only
question," so that you can be rewarded, since you weren't the official
answerer and went beyond the call of duty anyway.

We could also explore the copy desk angle and ask Dr. Ink:
http://poynteronline.org/column.asp?id=1&aid=7502