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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

"Its creator, Gary Larson (no relation!), retired in 1995, after having been syndicated in more than nineteen hundred newspapers and selling more than forty million books."

The Newyorker clearly cares a bit about grammar: "its" for ownership - no apostrophe. Then it goes a bit mad: an awkward comma between creator and Gary. There are multiple firing solutions here. You could go in with something like:

"Gary Larson (no relation!) retired in 1995. He was ... etc ...

I'm not asking for a return to the strictures of "Usage and Abusage" but I'd like to think that professional journalists are able to stick words on the page without them looking uncomfortable.

Prose should flow. When you write it, why not read it back to yourself.

[Cow holding a bow, wearing a 10 gallon hat and saying something unlikely to Rowland. Rowland is a chicken]

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The New Yorker is known for its superb standards in regards to grammar, though it does tend to favor passive voice like academic circles are wont to do. This is evident here, with a focus first on Larson's work, then an introduction to his person, and given that the article's main focus is on the work and not the person, this is a logical decision.

You have just used what would have been a useful opportunity to discuss Gary Larson's unique art style to insist how much more you, a Hacker News commenter, knows about prose than someone employed by the New Yorker.

Further, due to your comment's lack of clarification, I ironically cannot tell if you are insinuating that the author of the article used "its" correctly or incorrectly. For the record, because this possessive pronoun is referring to Gary Larson's work in the previous sentence, the usage is correct. [1]

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_possessive#Pronouns

Unfortunately they have a terrible standard of spelling at the New Yorker. Every time I read one of those words with the umlaut, it causes a full parse error in my brain, to the extent that I usually have to read the entire paragraph again.

Seriously, if you're not happy with "cooperate", spell it as "co-operate". This is an old standard, and it still works well. I don't get how the New Yorker tries to pretend they're the magazine of high society while spelling like Spın̈al Tap. The point of language is to have common understanding, and you can't do that if you're the only one using your weird spelling.

(Also, I wish they just got the the point in their articles. At least give a summary of why I would want to read the whole long form article before launching into some anecdote about two people meeting at a bar.)

As the New Yorker will grumpily tell you, it’s not an umlaut: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...

> She said that once, in the elevator, [the editor] told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died.

So, be careful whose weird house style you criticise, is the message.

If I write ä in HTML for an umlaut, I get U+00E4 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS in Unicode. It's like CJK unification all over again!

Diversity is strength – yes, even in writing. If you do not like the New Yorker's long form and quirky diaeresis, then do not read it. Other people (myself included) like the occasional long read with a cup of coffee on a foggy morning, where the prose winds its way slowly to build to a satisfying crescendo only after sufficient investment from you, the reader.

I personally do not like Hemingway's skeletal, scientific style – it feels to me like the writing of someone who does not revel in the pleasure of writing. However, I recognize that's a personal preference, and under no circumstances would I embark on a crusade to have fewer people read him or suggest that Hemingway do something different to satisfy me.

Perhaps I feel so strongly about this because I come from a country that would forcefully insist on designated styles of art - Soviet realism is the only acceptable art style, Pravda has the official and only acceptable journalism. It's wrong.

One of the things necessary for a free society is free critique of art as well. Even if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not all art is the same quality. If you don't believe me, spend a few hours on fanfiction.net.

I tried with the New Yorker. I subscribed last year, and it got to the point that no one in the house wanted to read it. We'd look at the cartoons, apply the universal captions to them ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10262979 ), but articles felt like chores. That's nothing against long form journalism, just that they don't try to make their articles accessible.

It's like going to movies without a seeing a preview or knowing the genre. Sometimes that works really well, but if you get 15 minutes in and start wondering why you should care about any of these people, it's time to move on. It's great that this never happened to you.

But it just so happened that their house style causes my text parser to fail all the way up the stack. My fast english reader throws an exception, and asks my foreign word region of the brain to see if it has a match. Heuristics say it's English, English says it's not a word, which then throws an exception that bubbles up to my top level of consciousness to decide what it means. It takes all of five seconds, but in the process it interrupts the flow of reading. Which gives the conscious mind time to ponder -- why am I reading this anyway? The answer too often came back negative.

Nothing wrong with you liking the magazine, or other people. But to me, the diaereses are the Jar Jar Binks of the New Yorker -- something designed to take me out of the action because the writer couldn't kill his darlings. And I don't think it's wrong to complain about specific aspects of art that make it unenjoyable.

I agree, of course free critique of art should be encouraged, and not all art is created equal, with the bookends of the quality spectrum particularly discernible.

But the reason people keep down-voting you is because those kinds of meta-discussions have a time and place. No, I'm not trying to erode someone's freedom to speak their mind whenever they would like - it's just talking about anything outside of scope is counterproductive and wastes everyone's time (not to mention that some people you could have rallied to your cause are going to be displeased enough by the conduct to not ever become an ally). A post on Hacker News titled "Why The New Yorker has those funny dots above some letters" is a great place for this kind of discussion. Or a post about orthography. Or even "What can print publications do to stay relevant in the age of the Internet?" (New Yorker's answer: bold, archaic choices in style. Your answer - wrong decisions! You have had it with their nonsense!)

But discussing the same topics under a post that celebrates a particular artist's work (and the host of that article just happens to be The New Yorker) tends to be unwelcome, and for good reason. It's like attending a Chemistry 101 lecture and then, when the professor finishes explaining the first five shapes of atomic orbitals, raising one's hand to say "Well, first off, the problems with this university are..." People are going to be irritated.

The New Yorker editors seem like snoots of the worst possible type. (Snoots of the better sort would include myself, Bryan Garner, and Wayne Schiess.)

Larson on the proper use of the English language:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/c4/ad/81/c4ad811c149c46a576bef2554...

https://bookriot.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/it-just-says...

> Then it goes a bit mad: an awkward comma between creator and Gary

That's not awkward at all. The comma separates "Gary Larson (no relation!)", a subordinate clause, from the main clause: "Its creator retired in 1995 […]".

Edit: As jcfields so kindly pointed out, it's apposition. Specifically, it's the use of a restrictive appositive.

To my eyes, the real awkward comma is the one after '1995'. However, The New Yorker is known to have its own, fairly specific punctuation style.

It’s called apposition.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apposition

The New Yorker is particularly fussy about including commas for nonrestrictive apposition, even when there is no possibility of a restrictive interpretation. For example:

"When he died, in 2004, his books and exhibitions were too numerous to count, and his magazine work had been published all over the world in the best publications." [0]

The copyeditors seem to think that writing "When he died in 2004" would imply that he had died not only in 2004 but also in another year.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/when-in-berlin...

It’s also the main cause of ambiguity in lists. This can be almost completely avoided by simply using parenthesis or dashes instead of commas to set off an appositive phrase and always using an Oxford comma.

Most grammarians seem to approve the use of parenthesis or dashes that way, so I’m not sure why commas are the most popular.

I'm guessing it's because they're seen as less distracting/invasive than the others while still getting the job done. Personally, I use parentheses and em-dashes a fair bit. But I do often find myself often going back and removing a number of them when I've overdone it.

Thanks for pointing that out. I added it to my comment, credited to you.

I wonder if the seemingly declining popularity of the oxford comma is related to a lack of knowledge of the use of non-restrictive appositives. Because your knowledge of the latter is what makes the use of the Oxford comma important to the classic phrase "We invited the two strippers, JFK and Stalin."

I don’t see declining usage. It’s never been AP style which you see in a lot of newspapers and press releases but not elsewhere. It’s OK with AP but mostly if it would be otherwise confusing.

It has seemed to me that the anti-Oxford comma crowd has grown in recent years. Although you questioning it makes me reconsider. It is possible social media has increased by exposure to the personal writing and opinions of people who were already against it. Like you mention, it is against the AP guide that journalists are generally taught to follow. And they are much more likely to tweet and anti-Oxford comma screed than write an article on it.

I'm at least a half-time professional writer and essentially all the writers I know are pro-Oxford comma--including ones who have to follow AP style for all or part of their day job.

And, again, to clarify AP a bit. AP doesn't say you can't use an Oxford comma but that you should only use it if the sentence could otherwise be misconstrued, e.g. the "We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin" that Oxford comma fans like to cite.

I don’t think the sentence is awkward at all.

In 7th grade my English teacher had us each put together a book on grammar. I used "The Far Side" cartoons to illustrate all of the rules that I had learned. I wish I could link to it, but the only copy, a hard copy, is somewhere in my parents' basement or attic.

I don't find it awkward at all - it's just an apposition.

(Admittedly also reversing the clauses makes for a complicated sentence structure. Depending on the level of literacy of the target audience, it might not be appropriate.)

"Gary Larson (no relation)" is an appositive, and you separate those with commas, so yeah that's part of their same caring about grammar.

I mean... it's not ungrammatical. That's just an appositive.

But you're still right. That sentence is clunky with all the commas, and your revision is an improvement.

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