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I can’t imagine looking to the APA beyond what’s required for college papers and loopy social science journals. The MLA is something of a Johnny-come-lately, perhaps therefore hewing to dated standards for presumed credibility.

The Chicago Manual of Style is good enough for me—http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Usage/faq0166.html—though I suspect for you nothing that veers from what you were taught in grammar school will suffice.

"The MLA is something of a Johnny-come-lately, perhaps therefore hewing to dated standards for presumed credibility...though I suspect for you nothing that veers from what you were taught in grammar school will suffice."

The MLA is older than the Chicago Manual, but that's beside the point. The Chicago Manual is also incorrect on some punctuation. Birds don't really communicate. Your ad hominem didn't help your argument, either. Try a study of of the logical fallacies. As for personalizing cats or otherwise staying too close,...

Parasite makes men dumb, women sexy
The Sydney Morning Herald ^ | 12/26/06
"A common parasite can increase a women's attractiveness to the opposite sex but also make men more stupid, an Australian researcher says. About 40 per cent of the world's population is infected with Toxoplasma gondii, including about eight million Australians. Human infection generally occurs when people eat raw or undercooked meat that has cysts containing the parasite, or accidentally ingest some of the parasite's eggs excreted by an infected cat."

On the reference to birds at the Chicago Manual site, birds don’t really “talk.” Animals squawk or make noises at each other for breeding purposes and the like. They don’t communicate with people. Birds are not people. They are things in formally written English language.

Linguistic activism for social pathologies pushed in recent decades won’t get much further anyway. It will end and be discarded after the conclusion of the debt paradigm. What passes for journalism now will pass away, too.