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‘The New Yorker’ magazine and the fixations of its outlier house style

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As you likely know, The New Yorker is a U.S. weekly magazine that features single-panel cartoons, journalism, commentary on politics and social issues, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, photography, poetry, crosswords and puzzles. Founded as a sophisticated humour magazine, it debuted on 21 February 1925. In 1927, after being threatened with libel for factual inaccuracies, the magazine developed extensive fact-checking procedures. Since 2010, it employs more than a dozen fact-checkers.

The New Yorker soon broadened its focus. It is published 47 times a year. It is known for its illustrated and often topical covers. Its archive of back issues is complete. The body text of its articles is set in Adobe Caslon. Some of its cartoons are oblique.

A showcase of modern literature

The New Yorker has published work by among others Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Hannah Arendt, Truman Capote, Rachel Carson, Roald Dahl, Naomi Fry, Atul Gawande, Susan B. Glasser, Sue Halpern, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Nicole Krauss, Joseph Mitchell, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Elizabeth Kolbert, Yiyun Li, Janet Malcolm, Vladimir Nabokov, Susan Orlean, Dorothy Parker, E. Annie Proulx, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, Allison Silverman and E.B. White.

Publication “is, for many writers, scaling a career peak. It’s also notoriously difficult to achieve… Your grammar, spelling, clarity and proper use of tense must be flawless” (Julia). Kurt Vonnegut has acknowledged how effective The New Yorker has been at getting a large audience to appreciate modern literature. In an interview, he said:

[T]he limiting factor [in literature] is the reader. No other art requires the audience to be a performer… [We] are teaching an audience how to play this kind of music in their heads. It’s a learning process, and The New Yorker… have a captive audience, and they come out every week, and people finally catch on to Barthelme, for instance, and are able to perform that sort of thing in their heads and enjoy it (cited in Wikipedia).

The captivating Adaptation (2002) by Charlie Kaufman, based on Susan Orlean’s equally captivating The orchid thief, appeared in The New Yorker before it became a book.

Which brings us to its style

The magazine uses spellings that are otherwise little used in U.S. English, such as fuelled, focussed, venders, teen-ager, traveller, marvellous, carrousel and cannister. It also spells out amounts, such as two million five hundred thousand dollars instead of $2.5 million. But the most prominent, discussed and criticised feature of its in-house style is its use of a diaeresis (pronounced die heiresses) (!) (Norris) (and no, it’s not an umlaut) in words with doubled vowels.

The New Yorker uses a diaeresis in words such as coöperation and reëlect to show that they are pronounced as distinct vowels. Without the diaeresis, some might pronounce naive like Neve Campbell’s first name. Yet the diaeresis is extremely uncommon in English, except in The New Yorker.

A ‘lawful evil’ style

Jonathon Owen’s style guide chart uses a nine-item scale, from good (lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good), to neutral, to lawful evil, neutral evil and chaotic evil. He categorises The Chicago Manual of Style as lawful good and the APA Publication Manual as chaotic evil, with several others somewhere in between. Of The New Yorker, he writes:

A lawful evil character “plays by the rules but without mercy or compassion.” The New Yorker uses jarring diereses to prevent misreading of words that no one has trouble reading, and it doubles consonants in words like focussed because it said so, that’s why. It also unnecessarily sets off certain phrases with commas based on a hyperliteral idea of what restrictive and nonrestrictive mean. Tell me that’s not mercilessly evil.

Mary Norris, the magazine’s ‘comma queen’ concedes – in a piece (ironically? unironically?) entitled The curse of the diaeresis– that Fowler (of Fowler’s Modern English Usage) states that the diaeresis “is in English an obsolescent symbol”. “Why bother?”, she asks. She concedes that, without these two dots,

most people would not trip over the ‘coop’ in ‘cooperate’ or the ‘reel’ in ‘reelect’… And yet we use the diaeresis for the same reason that we use the hyphen: to keep the cow out of co-workers”. In her view, “we have three options for these kinds of words: ‘cooperate,’ ‘co-operate,’ and ‘coöperate.’ Back when the magazine was just getting started, someone decided that the first misread and the second was ridiculous, and adopted the diaeresis as the most elegant solution with the broadest application.

But there’s a fourth option: leave these words be. Norris writes that her predecessor pestered the style editor, Hobie Weekes, who had been with the magazine since 1928, to lose the diaeresis. “She found it fussy. She said that once, in the elevator, he told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died”. This was 1978. “No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since” (Norris).

So, what is this? An homage to Mr. Weekes? Superstition akin to the curse of the Black Pearl? Fittingly, according to a satirical fake news piece by Clickhole, the magazine has announced that it will now also put a diaeresis over every letter O. It fake-quotes The New Yorker editor David Remnick as follows:

we’re making all our O’s like that now. We think it looks cool… The word zoo will now look like ‘zöö,’… Oprah is Öprah… our in-house style guide is world-renowned, and we employ some of the best copywriters in the country, and now they’re job is to stick twö döts ön töp öf every O they see. We’re the göddamn New Yörker. Anyöne whö cömes för us över the döts is göing tö end up lööking like a pretty huge dumbass.

‘Remnick’ concludes that its editors may also sometimes add a diaeresis over the letter E if they feel like it. “Nöw yöu knöw”, quips Owen. The New Yorker’s style, which Owen calls “distractingly idiosyncratic”, led to one of his favourite tweets: One’s house style oughtn’t to be visible from outer space. #totallynotasubtweet (Benjamin Dreyer, cited in Owen).

In response to Owen’s piece, ktschwarz wrote: “Mary Norris won’t quite come out and say it, but of course the real purpose of visible-from-space style choices is branding. The publisher wants to keep reminding you that this is the New Yorker you’re reading.” In turn, Owen replied to ktschwarz as follows:

I’ve had this same thought, though I really hate the idea of style-as-branding. In my opinion, the purpose of house style is (1) to make things easier for the reader by providing some consistency and, hopefully, by improving readability, and (2) to make things easier for the copy editors by giving them a consistent set of rules to follow so that they don’t constantly have to relitigate the same arguments over commas and capitalization. But style should be largely invisible (except to insiders like other writers and editors who know what to look for). It only exists to help writers write, editors edit, and readers read. It shouldn’t ever be a distraction from those things. I’m not an expert on branding, but you’d think there’d be ways to let people know what magazine they’re looking at or what site they’re on without distracting them from their reading.

Does The New Yorker’s in-house style consist of anything more than these three things – a few idiosyncratic spellings, numbers written out, and a dogged insistence on diaereses? But while it’s fair to call the magazine’s style “distractingly idiosyncratic” (Owen), by Jove, its content is much too good to pass up. And when one focuses on the latter, it becomes easy to overlook its arrantly pedantic (Owen) style with only a wry smile.

Sources

Jonathon Owen: Umlauts, diaereses, and The New Yorker. 24 March 2020.
Jonathon Owen: The style guide alignment chart. 3 September 2019.
Brooke Julia: How to submit to The New Yorker magazine. Updated 7 August 2017.
Writers Write: The New Yorker guidelines information.
Clickhole: Going rogue: ‘The New Yorker’ has announced that they’re going to start putting an umlaut over every letter ‘o’ and no one can stop them. 21 January 2020.
Mary Norris: The curse of the diaeresis. 26 April 2012.
Wikipedia: The New Yorker.

Images, in order of appearance:
Inside logo, The New Yorker, public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Rea Irvin, public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
The New Yorker, public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Barbara Shermund (1899–1978), public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
The New Yorker, public domain, Wikimedia Commons.