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Comment by HDMI_Cable | Hacker News Reader

This might be because the New Yorker (and other fancy newspapers) need to differentiate their writing from the very direct, straight to the point writing we see online nowadays. Instead of getting straight to the point, they meander on in an attempt to sound smarter.

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One thing that irks me about The New Yorker is their liberal use of diacritics. They've added umlauts to words with consecutive vowels like "cooperate" (coöperate) and "reelect" (reëelect), when it hasn't been a part of conventional American English (or any regional variant?) for quite some time.

It comes across as pretentious, which may be what they're going for and what their target audience wants to feel when they read The New Yorker.

i really like the new yorker, but it is 100% pretentious and it seems like the people who read/collect the magazines always fall into a bucket of "look how smart and well read i am"

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

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

The lesson is, it seems, don't mess with the not-umlaut.

They can't all be fans of Spinal Tap.

Those lead to mispronunciation of the words, in the examples you cite.

edit: ah... because they're not umlauts, they're diaeresis. Still, unneeded.

It seems to me that they try to make their matter-of-fact stories into quasi-prose. This doesn't work and result is mostly just boring.

Except the New Yorker isn't a newspaper, it's a literary magazine. It and its writing serve a different purpose.

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