The Grammarian

I lost the source for this link, but it’s too good to ignore.

Eleanor Gould was the “Grammarian” for the New Yorker for many decades. She recently died. The New Yorker honored her thusly, in part:

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town

“My list of pet language peeves,” she once told The Key Reporter, the Phi Beta Kappa newsletter, “would certainly include writers’ use of indirection (i.e., slipping new information into a narrative as if the reader already knew it); confusion between restrictive and non-restrictive phrases and clauses (‘that’ goes with restrictive clauses, and, ordinarily, ‘which’ with nonrestrictive); careless repetition; and singular subjects with plural verbs and vice versa.” She was a fiend for problems of sequence and logic. In her presence, modifiers dared not dangle. She could find a solecism in a Stop sign. Once in a great while, Miss Gould would lose her editorial patience–”No grammar! No sense!” was one exclamation of distress; “Have we completely lost our mind?” she once wrote in the margins of a Talk of the Town galley when the section still used the editorial “we”–but she did not take offense when her suggestions were overruled by another editor or the writer. Miss Gould once found what she believed were four grammatical errors in a three-word sentence. And yet the sentence, by Lawrence Weschler (and, alas, no longer remembered), was published as written.

This entry was posted on February 26th, 2005 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.