I love the New Yorker, but one thing that has always bothered me about the magazine is its snooty insistence on using accents that nobody else uses. Who writes elitism as élitism? Who writes cooperation as cöoperation or premiere as première?
The New Yorker, that’s who. No accents, please; we’re American. It’s not le Nouveau Yorker.
I guess it’s their way of being stylistically hyper-correct. The weird thing is, the magazine is totally incorrect when it prints a month followed by a year. Articles constantly use the formulation, “In November, 1962…” That comma between the month and the year annoys me to no end.
And now back to important things.
Though not in THE NEW YORKER, I’ve seen cooperation as co-operation, which makes a certain amount of sense to me.
All-caps is not the most fun to read, either. ;-)
Comma usage is not a science–I assume their policy is more generally that it’s better to maintain stylistic consistency over the long term than it is to satisfy the younger generation.
“We’ve always done it this way,” is a surprisingly potent excuse.
Another thing that sometimes bugs me is how they spell out all (even fantastically large) numbers, maybe with the exception of years. Although, OK, I can sort of appreciate how they might think numbers might be jarring in the middle of a lot of text (if that is indeed the justification).
Total tangent: I also subscribe to the Atlantic, and for some reason I like that they hang their punctuation. When, for example, a quotation mark comes at the beginning or end of a line, it hangs a bit into margin to keep the letters justified. I’m sure it could drive a person crazy, but I just like the fact that someone at the magazine pays attention to it.
You should be annoyed. Any civilized person ought to be annoyed. There is nothing more important than the comma. Unless, of course, it is the period.
The month (no comma) year style is used by:
1. historians (see “Dates” paragraph)
2. the New Jersey judiciary (see paragraph 3B on page 22)
3. authors (see “Dates”)
4. business professionals (see paragraph 4).
Although not specified, it seems the granddaddy of style manuals would concur as it parallels The Chicago Style Manual.
Given the above, how dare Eustace Tilley be snotty. Oops, snooty.