Question from a Reader About New Yorker Style

Abigail, commenting on this old post, asks: Does anybody know if The New Yorker has an editorial style guide that one could lay one's hands upon? As an editor myself-- known as The Comma Queen by some whose work I have put a pencil to-- I would be most interested in seeing it.

Me, too.

I Googled "New Yorker Style Guide" and found a third-party mention of it here


But I didn't look much further. Anyone know?

OED's Definition of 'Siphon'

According to this article, the Oxford English Dictionary had a faulty definition of "siphon" for 99 years.

Having worked in publishing for so long, I don't think that's stop-the-presses surprising. If authors and journalists and highly regulated oil-extraction companies and everyone else can make errors, there's no reason that lexicographers responsible for the enormous OED should be any different.

What interests me more about this article is how it's written. The second sentence is "Siphons don't work, it turns out, because of atmospheric pressure, as the OED has been saying since 1911."

Here's another way to say that. "Since 1911, the OED has been saying that siphons work because of atmospheric pressure. That, it turns out, is not true."

But, no. The writer relegated the most important piece of information in the whole article to a subordinate clause: "AS the OED has been saying." That annoys me. The placement of "it turns out" annoys me, too. Usually, that phrase cues the reader that something they already know about "turns out" to be wrong. But in this article, you learn that something "turns out" to be wrong before you learn what that something is.

Maybe I've been copy editing too much lately, thereby focusing too much on little issues like this, but I find all this rather irksome.

Valuable Typos

I always think of typos as bad things. But this AOL News story is a reminder that they can be valuable. The story lists nine published works that, in early typo-laden printings, are worth some money. They include old works like a 1600s Bible and newer stuff like an error-riddled early printing of "The DaVinci Code."

Fortune Cookie Misfire

It was as fine a sentiment as any you'd get from a cookie: "You have good luck in your personal affairs."

Unfortunately, when my husband pulled the fortune out of the cookie, it tore in half. All we saw was, "You have goo in your personal aff."

We're just glad the last word wasn't "associations."

From the Department of Clever Wordplay

A full-page ad in today's LA Times.

Words I'm Looking Up (One in an occasional cleverly named series in words I'm looking up)

acronym

I'm teaching on online copy editing course (or, as the school calls it, a copyediting course). This week, students are learning about "acronyms."

I've long had an issue with this word. People use it interchangeably with "initialisms." But not all dictionaries support that.

Webster's New World College Dictionary, which is the designated resource in the newspaper copy editing work I do, says that an acronym is a set of initials pronounced as a word: radar, NASCAR. Initials that are pronounced as individual letters are not acronyms but initialisms: FBI, FAA, CIA.

BUT, Merriam-Webster, which is the designated dictionary for the Chicago Manual of Style, which is what we follow in the course, does allow using acronym to mean initialism, albeit reluctantly.

The author of the textbook for the copy editing course mentions this distinction in a footnote, but adds that it's common to call initialisms acronyms -- then she proceeds to do so throughout the chapter. I couldn't leave it alone. I informed students that, according to another widely used dictionary, this use of "acronym" is an error and that, even according to our dictionary, it's questionable.

I recommended that, as copy editors, they observe the distinction.

I have no doubt that the dictionaries will soon be changed to reflect real-world usage of the word "acronym." But, until they do, I think that people who aspire to careers as copy editors should take the more conservative approach. (Or at least be made fully aware of the controversy.)

The Cosmos Were or the Cosmos Was

A guy who reads my newspaper column wrote to scold me about using "the cosmos were" in the column in the sentence "I realized the cosmos were begging me to question 'beg the question.'"

The reader had "double-checked" a dictionary and saw that "cosmos" is singular. Therefore, it should have been "cosmos was."

After writing this column for nearly nine years, you'd think I'd be used to stuff like that. But I'm not. I always bristle and get defensive and run around my house looking for books that back me up.

I didn't like what I found. All three of the dictionaries I checked treated "cosmos" as, basically, a singular. There is a plural form, spelled the same way, but, as the dictionaries very briefly mention it, it seems to apply only when you're talking about two or more cosmos (cosmoses?). And who the heck ever does that?

Plus, none of the dictionaries I checked had any discussion/usage notes that you see with words like "politics," which can take a singular or plural verb depending on the sentence.

But, after fifteen minutes of scrambling for weapons with which to defend myself, I had a strange urge to check the original article I had turned in to my editors. Turns out, I had written "the cosmos was." An editor changed it "were."

Often, "gotcha" e-mails inspire columns. Whether I'm right or wrong, these correspondences with readers usually deal with issues that make good columns. I'm always more eager write about the arguments I win, of course. But I can sometimes man up enough to publicly admit when I'm wrong.

But this time is different. Neither the reader nor I was wrong, per se. If there was an error (and I find that highly disputable), it was an editor's. Even if it wasn't a language error, it's always an error for an editor to make a chance s/he hasn't researched.

Still, can you imagine a column in which a columnist whines about how an editor made her look bad in a prior column? Not cool.

Will the reader believe my reply of "It wasn't my fault. Honest! I was framed!"? Probably not.

I'm not sure why I chose the singular verb to go with "cosmos." I didn't put any thought into it. Still, I'm not sure where I stand. "The cosmos are cruel" sounds much better to me than "The cosmos is cruel." And I don't know if I agree with the interpretation that the dictionaries support only the singular verb.

I'm still too frazzled to make up my mind. But someday I'll be grown-up enough to handle these things better ....