Like all publications worth their ink, Hispanic Link Weekly Report created its own stylebook years ago. For new staffers, it answers such questions as:

Is George López Hispanic or Hispano or Latino? Or maybe just a lower-case latino?

Was George Washington white or White? Was he an Anglo?

Can a mejicano or a peruano be an American?

Is Los Angeles a majority minority or minority majority city? Or neither one?

Are aliens just from Outer Space? Or do some come from Tijuana?

All the answers have been recorded in our Link stylebook, which over the years has had countless revisions.

Our dilemma now is nobody can find our stylebook. We must rely on our memories. And in the case of Charlie Ericksen, our patriarch publisher, that’s not a good idea. He’s forgets a lot.

But he has his good days. Like last week, a new columnist emailed whether we capitalize races. Charlie fired right back:

“We go lower case on black and white and use Afro-American or black pretty much interchangeably, guided by the author’s preference. If the term is in a direct quote, we go with what the speaker used, of course. We don’t use ‘minorities’ to mean blacks, Asians, Hispanics, etc.”

Ericksen then shares his scorn over the way major dailies refer to Los Angeles as a “majority minority” city and brands anyone who calls a Hispanic a “minority” as guilty of a word-felony.

“It’s demeaning,” he says. “We are not less than.”

He rambles forward: “Interestingly, the media and many scholars have gone full circle on use of ‘color’. Years ago, out went ‘colored people’. Now ‘people of color’ are/is in. And in spite of the accepted term ‘La Raza’, Hispanics can be of any ‘race’. Someday, the Census Bureau may discard that passé classifier.

“Our first featured columnist and my dear late friend, José Antonio Burciaga, always used ‘Indo-Hispanic’. It’s certainly more precise for most inhabitants of the ‘American’ hemispheres.

“Hispanic Link doesn’t use ‘Americans’ to mean U.S. residents solely. What are Central and South Americans? Chopped iguana? We are Unitedstatesians, but that doesn’t ring right to me.

“In our lost stylebook, undocumented immigrants aren’t ‘illegal aliens’, no matter how AP defines them. Humans can’t be illegal. The only illegal aliens I ever met came from Mars.

Ericksen concludes, “I feel better already, getting this out of my system, just as I do after belching (to clean up a simile).”