Between you & me

This is a New Yorker memoir/ English usage history/ style guide. All these things appeal to me. I subscribe to the New Yorker, but don't love it, I enjoy the history of language quirks, but I am not a linguist, and I try to write well, but often write crap.

Maybe trying to be three things at once gets in the way of being really good at one, it's only 200 pages, but being a multitasker increases the addressable market. Honestly, I am not going to buy Garner's Modern English and I could read about inside New Yorker gossip, but she probably couldn't publish that. In fact, the best part of the book was her correspondence with James Salter over his comma use, followed by the million dollar copy editor who dated JD Salinger.

Actually, my biggest compliant about Salter is that he makes sentences out of prepositional phrases or just a few words that are not complete sentences, "Above it he and Rand. It was all one great angelic order. Flesh, spirit, gods. Wages, three dollars an hour." There are four periods and one sentence. That's from the first page of Solo Faces, his best novel IMO. "Just. Do. Not. Do. It." this trend has become cliche, I know that Salter wrote before the trend but he over does it too.

I disagreed with Norris on some points. I prefer to refer to the serial comma as the Oxford comma. This is like calling a soda a Coke, a tissue a Kleenex or a copy a Xerox. The corporate term is more vivid. The serial/Oxford comma should only be used to distinguish ambiguity in lists of multiple items: "invited we're his two ex-wives, Kris Kristoffersion and Waylon Jennings". It is not needed here: "my favorite colors are red, white and blue". Norris says to always use it, I disagree. She defends the New Yorker's spelling quirk of always doubling the consonant when it comes after a vowel and before a suffix like "ed" - like "travelled", which is less annoying than the diaereses.

Norris in the book doesn't get into the New Yorker's most annoying quirk - the diaeresis. That is the two dots over the second vowel, not to be confused with the umlaut, in words like coordinate and reelection. She did write a piece in the New York about it - www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis

Finally, the New Yorker famously got rid of the word slacks. I would have gotten rid of trousers, because slacks is gender neutral, women can wear slacks but not trousers, and doesn't come with the authority connotations of pants, "she wears the pants, bossy pants, cranky pants, etc." Further, slacks is one syllable derived from Anglo-Saxon whereas Trousers is two and sounds French although its actually Gaelic.