Question for British list members/PS for Goddlefrood

[Carol]

> Geoff:
> Depends to what type of usage your manuals are referring. There is a
difference between "official" documents and newspapers for example. I
don't think people would frown over the use of the "th". I certainly 
wouldn't and would rather welcome it.

Carol responds:
I'm talking about publishers' style manuals for books, not government
documents or periodicals. U.S. publishers generally follow the Chicago
Manual of Style. Scholarly books and articles in the humanities, or at
least, in language and literature, usually follow Modern Language
Association (MLA) style. Articles in the social sciences (psychology
and sociology) generally follow American Psychological Association
(APA) style, which I hate.

I've found a few British style guidelines (British publishers don't
like commas!), some of which allow, for example, a spaced en dash (a
short dash, not to be confused with a hyphen) where American style
guides would require an unspaced em dash (long dash) and all of which
recommend the 11 September 2001 format for dates.

So it's not a matter of what "people would welcome." It's a matter of
the publisher's house style, which may or may not conform to a style
guide such as (for British publications) the Modern Humanities
Research Association (MHRA) style guide, which I have downloaded, and
the Oxford Style Manual, which, unfortunately, is not available online.

CMS, for example, says: "Although the day of the month is actually an
ordinal (and so pronounced in speaking), the American practice is to
write it as a cardinal number: 18 April or April 18, *not* 18th April
or April 18th" (CMS 14th ed. 8.38, emphasis in original).

What I need is an equally clear guideline for British usage (for
books, not newspapers or spoken English). I do own Fowler's, which
states that OUP (Oxford University Press) house style is "the type 25
June 1990" (no mention of ordinals), so I'll go with that.

Carol, assuming that everyone on the list knows the difference between
ordinal numbers, such as "first" or ""third" or "eleventh," and
cardinal numbers, such as "one" or "three" or "eleven"