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Filed under: In Memoriam Tagged: copy editing, David Remnick, E.B. White, Eleanor Gould, George Orwell, grammar, in memoriam, language, Verlyn Klinkenborg
R.I.P., Miss Gould. Verlyn Klinkenborg:
To some people, I suspect, she came to embody the negative image of the copy editor: punctilious, schoolmarmish and blue-stockinged. But the grasp she had on the written word, on the inner springs and impulses of the language, made grammar and syntax and diction resemble the laws of physics. From one angle, those laws mark the limits of nature. From another angle, they define the very energies that shape the universe and make it intelligible.
In a review of 75th-anniversary New Yorker books I wrote five years ago for Newsday, I made an awful error that was compounded by the newspaper's customary lack of a checking department: I referred to "the late Miss Gould." Now that the fact is true, that intelligible universe is sadly less so.
Later: In the February 28 issue, Remnick writes his own tribute to the Grammarian. "She shaped the language of the magazine, always striving for a kind of Euclidean clarity—transparent, precise, muscular. It was an ideal that seemed to have not only syntactical but moral dimensions."
Gould—like Orwell, Fowler, Bernstein, White, and the modest others now marking proofs in offices—knew well that clear language so often indicates a clear conscience, or will once the copy editor is done with it. "That type is all but extinct," we say of such people, as of a Galapagos turtle. When the real death occurs it is immeasurably sadder.
The Point of Miss Gould's Pencil [NY Times]
Miss Eleanor Gould '38, Grammarian Extraordinaire, Holds The Line at The New Yorker [Oberlin alumni magazine]
An Ode to Miss Gould: The Fallibility Rag [Cynthia Ozick, via PBK]
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Emdashes, founded in 2004, is currently written and drawn by Emily Gordon, Martin Schneider, Pollux, Jonathan Taylor, and Benjamin Chambers, as well as occasional guest contributors. (Unsigned posts through October 2008 are by Emily Gordon.)
The site is designed and maintained by House of Pretty and illustrated by Jesse Ewing for Inkleaf Studio. Additional drawings are by Carolita Johnson and Pollux (who also draws our daily comic, "The Wavy Rule"). The kissable Emdashes logo is by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.
Other writing by Emily Gordon
- Profile: Valerie Casey, Designers Accord founder, is spearheading the design of sustainability (for SXSW World; PDF, p. 20)
- Feature: Rea Irvin: visionary art director, man about town, and New Yorker founding father (for Print)
- Report: Learning to read with comic books--that are edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
- Interview: Designer Eleanor Grosch (for Print)
- Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
- Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
- Review: Does a New Republic redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
- Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
- Report: Eustace Tilley spruces up for The New Yorker's website redesign (for Print)
- Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
- Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
- Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
- Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
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Comments
Possibly an improvement your Weblog could make is to stop emulating Gawker by piling links onto the tail end of your stories. Hyperlinks are inline, not footnotes.En tout cas: Note to copy-editors: Don't sell yourselves short.
I did that a lot in my early days of blogging. I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.