CMOS 16 CHANGES, #6

Capitalize terms of endearment (honey, dear, sweetheart) or not? The Chicago Manual of Style‘s 15th edition said they should be lowercased. Now?

 
I scoured the 16th edition, looking for this rule, and found nothing. So I e-mailed the Chicago Q&A folks and asked. They said, “It no longer appears. Since capped and lowercased work equally well, it seemed excessive to dictate a rule.”

Goodness! Doesn’t CMOS know how much we writers and editors rely on them dictating such rules?

Anyway, looks like this has become an author/publisher discretion issue.

But since the previous edition of CMOS suggested lowercase, I’d recommend going with that unless you have a really strong urge otherwise. (Or if you’re writing for Barbour, who’s been capitalizing terms of endearment even though CMOS-15 said otherwise.)