What do readers of The New Yorker complain about most when they write letters to the editor? Those two dots above vowels in words like cooperate and reelect. The diaeresis, as those marks are known, has remained in use at the magazine ever since the copy editor who planned on nixing it died in 1978, and the whole saga is chronicled in fellow New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris’s new memoir, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Dreaded Diaeresis”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
When readers who care about grammar and style write letters to the New Yorker magazine, there’s one thing that they complain about more than anything else.
Can you guess what it is?
Harvard comma. Oxford comma.
No.
The two dots over the O.
Yes, yes. The diaresis.
Diaresis.
Yes.
Fancy.
It’s a diacritical mark that’s over the vowel, the second of two vowels that are bumping up against each other.
So in words like re-elect or re-enact or dius or cooperate, so you don’t mistake them for cooperate or something like that.
I mean, who needs that, right?
Well, kind of.
The clue is there if you want it.
Right.
But I’m one of the complainers.
I mean, I haven’t written to them, but I would write to them.
And we know that it’s the most common complaint because of a wonderful new book called Between You and Me, Confessions of a Comic Queen.
And this is by Mary Norris, the longtime copy editor at The New Yorker.
And she explains why they’re still using it.
Oh, do tell.
Well, she says that her predecessor had a conversation with the style editor at the magazine and said, you know, we really should get rid of this.
It looks kind of fussy.
Nobody else uses it.
And so they had a conversation about it, and the style editor said, you know, I’m on the verge of changing that rule, and I’m going to send out a memo soon.
But he died before he could send out the memo.
So they just kept doing it.
Yes, and Mary Norris writes, this was in 1978.
No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since.
Because if you try to remove the diarysis, you’re going to die.
You don’t want your diarysis removed.
It’s just vestigial anyway, but yeah.
Right. I know. I know. Aren’t you on the same page, so to speak, with me, Grant?
A little bit, but I know that the diarysis solves the problem of not having to hyphenate, which often is done in other style guides where cooperate would be C-O-H-E-N-O-P-E.
Yeah, which also looks fussy and pretentious to me.
Well, it looks old-fashioned to me, but there is, particularly given the really casual tone that some New Yorker techs can take, especially on the web-only content, there’s a register mismatch there.
There’s just a problem where I’ve got Andy Borowitz writing stuff, and they’re using the highfalutin style guide from the New Yorker, and it just doesn’t match.
I mean, I guess this is my pet peeve.
I just think it’s silly.
But then I think, well, you know, we always advise people with pet peeves to turn them around and just notice them.
Do your field work and notice where they appear and think of them as a little hello from Martha and Grant.
Maybe that’s how I should look at the…
Right, there we go.
When you have a pet peeve, put a leash on it, give it a name.
And get it off the streets and get it neutered so it doesn’t breathe, right?
It doesn’t breathe, there we go.
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