Skip to content

Tag: mary norris

“Awesome” is the New “Massive”

The New Yorker‘s ‘Comma Queen’ Mary Norris considers (mis)use of the words “massive” and “awesome”:

Comments closed

Comma Queen: Mad Dash

The New Yorker‘s Mary Norris, author Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, clarifies the difference between the hyphen (-), the en dash (–), and the em dash (—):

Comments closed

Comma Queen: Possessed

In the second episode of The New Yorker‘s Comma Queen video series, copy editor Mary Norris tackles using an apostrophe to form the possessive:

 

I am one of those people who annoy Norris by dropping the ‘s’ after the apostrophe when a name ends in ‘s’. I’m sure she is right — I’m certainly not going to argue with her! — but the exceptions seem completely infuriatingly arbitrary to me!

UPDATE: Mary Norris, whose memoir Between You & Me is out next week, is profiled in today’s New York Times:

Ms. Norris says she tries not to bring her work home with her. But she often has to restrain herself. Bad punctuation leaps out at her. Sloppy diction and grammatical errors in conversation register as minor assaults on her ear, as if her headphones had suddenly erupted into high-pitched feedback.

Her pet peeves include poorly punctuated signs; people who call the serial comma the Oxford comma; the wrong sort of pencil; the misuse of “who” and “whom” and other crimes against the accusative; book introductions by writers other than the author; incorrectly deployed apostrophes; people she meets on vacation who harass her about The New Yorker’s style; and grammatical errors in popular songs. She is particularly irked, she said, by the line “Till the stars fall from the sky for you and I” from “Touch Me” by the Doors.

Me, I’m just irked by The Doors.

 

Comments closed

Comma Queen

The New Yorker has launched a new video series “devoted to language in all its facets” called Comma Queen. In the first episode, copy editor Mary Norris talks about commas, the “little squiggle” with “a history rich in controversy”:

 

On a related note, Julia Holmes reviews Mary Norris’ book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, for the New Republic:

copy-editing can also be a soul-crushing enterprise. Not the work itself, which is perfectly pleasant and definitely necessary, but the surprising and strictly enforced class system that almost always accompanies it. Magazines are rigidly hierarchical places, no matter how outwardly easygoing and free-spirited and ad hoc they may endeavor to look on a visit to the office. A funny thing about publishing is that it’s populated almost exclusively by frustrated writers. It’s a kind of slow-burn Stanford Prison Experiment, in which former English majors are randomly assigned the roles of language guard and word prisoner, affirming once more how quickly and insanely people will adapt to new, relative states of power and powerlessness.

Mary Norris’s very funny, lucid, and lively new book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, illuminates this shadow world at last. It’s part memoir, part language guide, and part personal account of life at The New Yorker (where Norris has worked as a copy editor since 1978). “One of the things I like about my job,” she writes, “is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey.”

Norris exemplifies what David Foster Wallace observed in “Authority and American Usage”: “We tend to like and trust experts whose expertise is born of a real love for their specialty instead of just a desire to be expert at something.”

Comments closed

Learning to Love the House Style

In a long and charming essay for The New Yorker, the magazine’s query proofreader Mary Norris muses on her career, and the history and uses of the comma:

Then I was allowed to work on the copydesk. It changed the way I read prose—I was paid to find mistakes, and it was a long time before I could once again read for pleasure. I spontaneously copy-edited everything I laid eyes on. I had a paperback edition of Faulkner’s “The Hamlet” that was so riddled with typos that it almost ruined Flem Snopes for me. But, as I relaxed on the copydesk, I was sometimes even able to enjoy myself. There were writers who weren’t very good and yet were impossible to improve, like figure skaters who hit all the technical marks but have a limited artistic appeal and sport unflattering costumes. There were competent writers on interesting subjects who were just careless enough in their spelling and punctuation to keep a girl occupied. And there were writers whose prose came in so highly polished that I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to read them: John Updike, Pauline Kael, Mark Singer, Ian Frazier! In a way, these were the hardest, because the prose lulled me into complacency. They transcended the office of the copy editor. It was hard to stay alert for opportunities to meddle in an immaculate manuscript, yet if you missed something you couldn’t use that as an excuse.

Norris’s book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, will be published by W. W. Norton in April.

Comments closed