The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
serious crayons:
On the other hand, i just came across a particularly egregious example of the New Yorker's ridiculous attribution-structure policy:
"It's just absolutely out there, surreal and brilliant," the actress Helen Mirren, whose husband, Taylor Hackford, directed the film, said. (in the John Lahr profile of AL Pacino in the Sept. 15 issue.)
Actually introducing a whole other person forces the reader top stop and think -- wait, who said this, Helen or Taylor?
Any other publication would have used the much clearer "said the actress Helen Mirren, whose husband ..." What is the NY's problem with that?
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on September 19, 2014, 11:17:33 am ---On the other hand, i just came across a particularly egregious example of the New Yorker's ridiculous attribution-structure policy:
"It's just absolutely out there, surreal and brilliant," the actress Helen Mirren, whose husband, Taylor Hackford, directed the film, said. (in the John Lahr profile of AL Pacino in the Sept. 15 issue.)
Actually introducing a whole other person forces the reader top stop and think -- wait, who said this, Helen or Taylor?
Any other publication would have used the much clearer "said the actress Helen Mirren, whose husband ..." What is the NY's problem with that?
--- End quote ---
Don't know, but I agree with you and I've said before how annoying I find that sentence structure, especially when it's repeated ad nauseum in the same article. That said just lands there with a thud, like a safe on Wile E. Coyote.
serious crayons:
And what was the copyeditor thinking to let through this sentence construction -- by, of all people, the erudite Adam Gopnik?
"To see her as a victim of other people's cruelties is also to take an old-fashioned and romantic attitude toward the mental illness from which she suffered, even if the treatments for it in her day strike us as uncivilized and ignorant (as ours will in the future)." (from a piece about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in the Sept. 22 issue)
Maybe I'm being picky, but the end of that sentence strikes me a non sequitur; in the future, it won't be "us." Either "even if the treatments for it in her day now seem uncivilized and ignorant (as ours will in the future)" OR "even if the treatments for it in her day strike us as uncivilized and ignorant (as ours will to people of the future)."
Jeff Wrangler:
Yours is much better than Gopnik's, Katharine.
Sometimes I wonder whether TNY is even copyedited at all anymore.
Jeff Wrangler:
I found Meghan Daum's personal history piece in the Sept. 29 issue, which I read over lunch today, to be a real downer.
Fortunately, the movie listings section included a reprint of Pauline Kael's capsule review of A Streetcar Named Desire, where Kael had this to say about the film: "Elia Kazan's direction is often stagy, and the sets and the arrangement of actors are frequently too transparently 'worked out,' but who cares when you're looking at two of the greatest performances ever put on film and listening to some of the finest dialogue ever written by an American?"
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