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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated, but I’m perplexed by the use of “coöperative”–I’ve never come across this spelling.

The New Yorker is kind of well known for being virtually the only significant English publication which uses a diaeresis (the ¨) where almost everyone else uses a hyphen or just two repeated letters [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ö#In_English, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...

>Those two dots, often mistaken for an umlaut

Hmm maybe it's because it looks exactly like an umlaut and is often placed exactly where an umlaut would be placed?

The diaeresis and umlaut are literally exactly the same Unicode character and the symbol or diacritic itself can be called either. The difference is what it does to the vowel — it’s a diaeresis if it indicates a repeated vowel, and an umlaut if it modifies the vowel sound.

Just to note, a diaeresis isn't always the same vowel repeated. The most common example is "naïve", and it also occurs in names like Chloë.

Whoops, you’re right, my explanation missed that!

Many of the N.Y.C. media outlets have style guides that may seem odd to other native speakers of American English. The one I find amusing is their insistence on using periods in acronyms and initialisms where no one else does.

Of course, N.Y.C. is probably just as correct as NYC, but they do it even when it is manifestly wrong.

One example is I.B.M. The major N.Y.C. media all spell it with periods, even though IBM itself does not use them.

Another is the SOS Morse Code distress signal, which the New Yorker spells S.O.S. with periods, seemingly in the belief that it is an initialism.

SOS is not an abbreviation or acronym or initialism at all. It is not even three separate letters when sent in Morse Code. It is a "prosign", which means that it is a single long Morse character, not sent as three separate letters with pauses between them.

It would be properly typeset with an overscore above the three letters, and no periods, as shown in the Wikipedia article. The overscore indicates that it is a single long character, and the letters are just a way to remember it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOS

The New Yorker is weird like that.

They also insist on misspelling 'ensure' as 'insure': https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-univer...

I think they're just abusing their poetic license at this point, with the amount of times they choose to use archaic spellings and meanings of words, and I wish they would actually stop.

> They also insist on misspelling 'ensure' as 'insure'

M-W agrees, and not even marks it as archaic: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insure

Ensure and insure carry different connotations, as detailed at the bottom of the Webster link.

Likewise here: https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=assure

Though they differ only slightly, and in the concrete example in the article "insure" still fits, IMO.

Relevant link: https://www.wordnik.com/lists/the-new-yorkers-style-manual

Also "fibre-optic" and excessive use of hyphens (eg in numbers like forty-two). The New Yorker uses weird styles.

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