The new 'New Yorker' style
I like what they've done but wonder why they didn't do more
Jeff Kaufman, of Needham, writes: “Please comment on the March 12 story in The New York Times about The New Yorker’s recent changes to its style guide. I suspect you have many views on their style.
My recommendation to them is: Stop writing out numbers. Just use the numerals, except at the beginning of a sentence.
Indeed, I do have views, Jeff! I greatly admire The New Yorker, and I think changes to its house style (the way it presents words that legitimately might or might not be hyphenated, capitalized, italicized and so forth) were overdue — so good for them for making some. I’m not, however, sure they made all the changes that would be to their benefit.
The Times article reported that “potential changes were crowdsourced from a group of current and former editors and copy editors,” and the head of The New Yorker’s copy department, Andrew Boynton, and a colleague decided which ones to go ahead with. Boynton explained why they chose not to make certain style changes that close observers might have expected: “We don’t want to make a change and then change it back. We want to make sure it’s a lasting change that is elsewhere in the world and that people are familiar with and comfortable with.”
That explanation strikes me as unsatisfactory. An example of a change I would have expected was lopping the hyphen out of teen-ager. When I called up an online corpus containing more than 20 billion words that have appeared over the last 15 years on the websites of English-language newspapers and magazines around the world, I could readily see that the vast — and I do mean vast — majority of recent uses of teen-ager with a hyphen appeared in The New Yorker. Guys, that hyphen is not coming back! Many publications have even moved on to teen. Likewise with various other quirks that the magazine has decided to persist with.
An important purpose that house style serves is to express something about the personality of the publication: Is it scholarly enough to allow footnotes? Irreverent enough to use slang and swear words? Deferential enough to authority to capitalize the title of anyone halfway important? The New Yorker is many things, one of which is unique, so it makes sense for its house style to be unique.
But the kind of uniqueness it displays in its house style doesn’t, according to me, suit the personality it has grown into. Its editor since 1998, David Remnick, and his predecessor, Tina Brown, dragged the content away from the long, long articles, often with no contemporary angle at all (John McPhee’s series of stories on geology, wonderful as they were, come to mind), that had been its hallmark. They infused the magazine with new vigor and relevance. Members of the staff and contributors fiercely resisted the changes early on, but things settled down, and for the better.
Today’s New Yorker is of the moment. It reviews contemporary books, films, television shows, art exhibits, music, politics, and many other kinds of things that are going on around the world. So I wish that rather than relying on an old guard to deliberate on what changes they felt comfortable with, the magazine had reached out to top journalists elsewhere — as it did when it brought in Tina Brown and David Remnick — to modernize the magazine’s style to match its content. Many more changes could yet be made that they can be confident won’t need to be changed back.
Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.