New Yorker updates its style guide for the internet era

This week, the top copy editor of The New Yorker announced that the magazine has completed the “rebirth” of its home style.

Some things were changing. But its dedication to Dieresis – those two small dots that float above some vowels, beloved by the New Yorker editors and almost no one else – was not.

“For every person who hates Dieres and feels that it is precious and pretense and ridiculous, another person who finds it attractive.”

The magazine, which does not appear more than 100 a day, is famous for its attachment to heterodox spelling and punctuation rules. Therefore, the decision of Mr. Botton’s decision was notable to announce a change in the style guide on Monday in the Daily Newsletter of New Yorker. The revolution reached two squat paragraphs, including two dieres, three EM dash and four couples brackets.

The magazine will leave the web site, “in-box,” and “internet” in favor of the more familiar “website,” inbox “and” internet “. “Cellphone” would be a word instead of two.

,Welcome to 1995You might be thinking, “Mr. Botton wrote in the announcement, providing an example of another new rule: Italic will be done in an attempt to separate the ideas from other text.

The guardians of the magazine’s house style are deliberately slow to give concessions in the Internet era. “We don’t want to make a change and then change it back,” he said. “We want to ensure that this is a permanent change that is somewhere else in the world and people are familiar with it and are comfortable together.”

In January, on the suggestion of the magazine’s long -time editor David Ramanik, possible changes from a group of current and former editors and copy editors were crowded. Mr. Botton and a colleague came up with a list of proposals in February.

He was tight about which people were rejected. “I don’t want them to be, you know, fetish objects in the outside world,” he said.

The style of New Yorker’s style provokes strong reactions in the grammar scope of grammar. In Rai’s pieces and on social media, critics have long accused the magazine of snobberry, disqualification and excessive use of alpwilems.

They raise the issue with double dishes in “traveler” and “focused”. They thrive on its diversity on “reëlection”. Mr. Boynton once felt the need to mount a rescue in the way the magazine punctured as the authority of the magazine “Donald Trump Junior”. (This requires three punctuation marks in a row.)

Benjamin Draer, retired copy head of Random House, and author of “Draers English”, are his Qualies with the magazine’s home style. (For one, he called the Donald Trump Junior break mark “inexplicably disgusting”)) But he praised the most recent round of updates in a phone call on Wednesday.

“I have been making a joke for years that you do not necessarily have a house style that appears from outer space,” he said. “But this is what is about New Yorker: They want to be a new yorker.”

He said that he was relieved that the magazine did not remove it with Dieres. He was happy that its editors stood by their exterior constructions of “Teen-Azer” and “percent”. But other updates were long.

“Finally a lowercase, shrinking ‘website’ for a single word – I think we did it in a random house, I don’t know, two decades ago?” He said.

The writer and editor of the magazine is still pleased with the changes, Mr. Botton said. In addition, he knows that they will break whatever rules they cannot stand.

Sometimes he gives them. “This is something that I think many people do not understand about New Yorkers,” he said. “We have exceptions all the time for the rules we have.”