One last thumbing of the nose at the Associated Press Stylebook before You Don't Say goes dark for a few days.*
Tomorrow is Mother's Day, and our pages are littered with references to Mom. I violated an AP style rule there, the one that says: "mom Uppercase only when the noun substitutes for a name as a term of address: Hi, Mom!"
You may have read before that AP style is not the boss of me. For sheer nitwittery, this one would be hard to top. Mom and Dad are commonly used as substitutes for names, becoming functional equivalents of names, like Pops and Meemaw and Coach. You would lowercase mom as a generic equivalent of mother. Thus: My mom made the best blackberry cobbler I ever ate, but I will never taste the like of Mom's blackberry cobbler.
If the stylebook editors had stopped at "Uppercase only when the noun substitutes for a name," without dragging direct address into it, the rule would be a commonsensical one reflecting common use. (Or is that what they meant, and they veered into direct address out of ineptitude?) Anyhow, common sense is our guide at The Sun.
And about all those references to moms littering our pages this weekend: I grit my teeth and allow most of them to go through, except when I absolutely can't stand it any longer (evidently having been scarred by reading Philip Wylie in my impressionable youth). It wouldn't kill you to refer to mothers as mothers, you know.
*I told you before: I am not going into rehab. Back soon.