New Yorker

At Throw Grammar From the Train , Jan Freeman alerts us to an article by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker on descriptivism vs. prescriptivism that will not enlighten you. Ms. Acocella rather tiresomely trots out George Orwell and Webster's Third and Dwight Macdonald and Strunk and White (Even conceding that The Elements of Style has become "a cult object," anyone writing for The New Yorker must apparently make...

In an antic moment last week, The New Yorker  pitched an appeal to readers:  What word would you most like to eliminate from the English language?   Awesome  and  epic  won some votes because of overuse, phlegm  from disgustingness, but moist , which has recently taken on an evil odor, overwhelmed. In its wisdom, however, The New Yorker chose slacks  as a word worthy of extinction .  This game, as Stan Carey points out at Sentence First , always draws a lot of players . In fact, as you can see on the comments at Johnson 's post on the same subject , all you have to do is broach the subject, and people start trotting out their nominees, like so many would-be Torquemadas hustling the condemned to the stake.  The extremity of the responses speaks to how much we personalize the language.

Yesterday, when  a story came across the desk with spokesperson in it and I let it go through, I checked the Associated Press Stylebook , and, sure enough, the fossil prohibition against the word is still in the 2011 edition. The editors might change their tune for the 2012 edition, but I doubt it. They cling lovingly to unexamined preferences. I tweeted some advice, "The Associated Press Stylebook continues its fuddy-duddy prohibition of 'spokesperson.' Suggest you ignore it. #ignoreAP," which I would like to expand on here.  Spokesperson has a 1972 citation from the Guardian as the earliest mention in the Oxford English Dictionary . There's also a 1976 citation from The New Yorker , and pray recall that that would be the old New Yorker , under Mr. Shawn's discriminating eye. The word has been around for forty years and can hardly be thought to be a neologism.

Avatar . ( 3 STARS) $31.2 million $595.7 million 7 weeks Rated : PG-13 Running time : 2:40 What it's about : A paraplegic ex-Marine (Sam Worthington, above) controls the body of an "avatar," a body of a creature on another planet, and gets caught up in a struggle between the humans and the natives. Our take : James Cameron has delivered the most-anticipated blend of live-action and motion-capture animation to date, but the story's simplistic.

Frances Schoonmaker lived in New York's Upper West Side working as a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College. She took subways and buses, and knew enough to stay alert on the streets of the big city. In nearly 30 years, she never once got mugged. She retired last year, moved to Rodgers Forge and let her guard down. Instead of crossing the street when she saw a suspicious woman on Stevenson Lane this past weekend, she walked by on her way to teach a Sunday school class at her church.

Americans who value the truth know that Sen. Barack Obama is a Christian, not a radical Muslim. Yet that lie had so penetrated the public's consciousness that when surveyed by the Pew Research Center this spring, 8 in 10 said they had heard rumors that he was a Muslim. Now, a satiric New Yorker magazine cover cartoon depicting Mr. Obama and his wife as terrorists in the Oval Office has caused a significant stir among supporters, already worried about a flood of Internet messages and Web postings filled with lies about the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's beliefs and history.

A satirical New Yorker cover cartoon picturing Barack Obama in the Oval Office dressed as a Muslim, his wife as a terrorist, and a portrait of Osama bin Laden hanging over a fireplace with a burning American flag elicited angry responses yesterday from the Democrat's presidential campaign and his supporters. But The New Yorker defended the artist and its cover, which illustrates an article titled "The Politics of Fear," as a satirical look at the scare tactics and misinformation being used to derail Obama's campaign.

Former defense lawyer and retired city Circuit Judge Elsbeth Bothe has had a fascination with macabre literature since her childhood. "These preoccupations were sparked early as I tossed out Nancy Drew's juvenile sleuthing stories in favor of the New Yorker magazine's marvelously scripted articles called Annals of Crime," said Bothe. "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote This blockbuster account of the detection, trials and ultimate punishment of the two psychopaths who slaughtered an upright Kansas farming family was originally published in the New Yorker [as a]

With injured local favorite Ah Day on the sidelines, a flock of New Yorkers will be at Laurel Park today to seek the winner's share of the purse in the Grade II, $300,000 General George Handicap. The field of eight has only one home entry, John Alecci-trained Ryan's for Real, and one other not stabled in New York, Marvel Wood, who campaigns primarily at Philadelphia Park and Delaware Park. And both are decided long shots in the morning line. They face a daunting task in trying to get on the board against shippers from New York who stand in the barns of Todd Pletcher, Kiaran McLaughlin, Rick and Tony Dutrow and Bruce Levine.