English-speakers are nihilists

"...all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large."
— H. P. Lovecraft

Sometimes I wish that the English language had an equivalent of L'Académie française. It's basically a regulatory body for the French language. Of course, it has no actual authority, and is sometimes comically out of step with the modern world in some cases, but still, there is a definitive, single, "correct" way of doing things in French, thanks to that group.

No such thing exists in English. Dictionaries and grammar guides cite regionalisms and common usage and stuff, but there's no definitive authority. This means that my job is sometimes a matter of picking which authority or rule seems more relevant, doing things one way in one part of a document and another way in another, splitting hairs, and sometimes just plain guessing.

For example, the doomed project contains about a dozen instances of a phrase like "must have leak proof, fireproof or fireproof-increased safety plumbing". The problem is, the document was inconsistent about exactly how "leak proof" was formatted, sometimes with a hyphen between the words, sometimes with a space, and sometimes with no separation at all.

As I was searching throughout the document to identify instances of this, I found some in the names of technical standards we reference, so that seemed to be the easiest way to resolve it: conform with the existing standards already published and in use by the industry. Simple enough, right?

No. Because there's more than one technical standard with a version of "leak proof" in the name, and they don't all handle it the same way.

OK, so I e-mailed all my fellow tech writers asking for advice. They referred to the relevant rule in the office's style guide about compounding and modifiers, which I should have thought of on my own because this is hardly the first time I've dealt with this. Based on how the phrase is used, it should be hyphenated. Fine, I've gone through the document and hyphenated it.

That doesn't match how it appears in one of those standards' names, but there's nothing we can do about that. Got to keep names as they appear on the title page, or no one could ever find them. There'd be chaos. We have some documents with English vs. American spelling, and that kind of inconsistency is OK, so this should be OK too.

But wait, there's more! It's not just inconsistency between one standard's name and the rest of the document. It's inconsistency within the phrase. It's now "must have leak-proof, fireproof or fireproof-increased safety plumbing". Using "leak-proof, fireproof" side by that is ugly and confusing and looks wrong even though it's technically not. We do it about a dozen times.

If there was an Academy of the English Language, then this problem might not exist at all. And weird situations would still arise sooner or later just because complicated rules make complicated situations, but at least there would be one right answer to fall back on. But there's not. There's just me, and whatever rules I copy and paste together.