Yesterday I tweeted: " 'Staunch the flow'? Am staunchly upholding a preference for 'stanch.' #amediting"
Dai Hawkins, a regular and thoughtful reader, promptly pointed out that the history in the Oxford English Dictionary shows that the two words have been functionally interchangeable for centuries. He later also cited Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage to similar effect.
He was quite right. To insist on limiting staunch as an adjective meaning "steadfast" and stanch as a verb meaning "to stop the flow of" is an arbitrary choice, though the American Heritage Dictionary's usage note indicates that these are still the most common senses in the United States.
Editing often means making arbitrary choices. A house style merely indicates that when there is more than one acceptable way to capitalize or abbreviate, we arbitrarily pick one to avoid distracting the reader with needless variants. But when we have pairs of words with blurred meanings, as staunch/stanch, the arbitrary choice becomes more difficult.
If I insist on stanch as the verb to satisfy my lingering purist sensibility, I run the risk of bewildering the reader for whom it is unfamiliar.
I am loath (NOT loathe) to surrender the sense of disinterested as "impartial," "not having a stake in the outcome." But there is an excellent chance that if I do not embed it in a context that makes that sense readily apparent, the reader may mistake my meaning as "indifferent" or "apathetic."
I can insist on gauntlet as "glove," in the metaphoric sense of a challenge (a knight throwing down his glove before an opponent) and gantlet as an ordeal (being forced to run between two lines of people beating you with sticks). But the spelling gauntlet for both is very old in English—American Heritage merely lists gantlet as a variant—and I have to wonder whether a reader less voraciously devoted to the literature of times past will understand running the gantlet or see it as a spelling mistake.
It won't do to get shirty about these distinctions, disparaging writers who do not share your preferences as illiterate or barbaric. Every time you make one of these choices, you are running the risk of being misunderstood, of catering to your own tastes rather than the reader's needs.
It's often not a clear-cut choice, and it's seldom easy.
Note: Tomorrow morning I will be conducting a workshop on skeptical editing sponsored by the Maryland-Delaware-District of Columbia Press Foundation, and after the end of Saturday night's shift at the paragraph factory I will be away for some days. Do not be alarmed as You Don't Say goes temporarily dark and I fall silent on Twitter and Facebook. I am not going into rehab, and I shall return.