Mary Norris has been a copy editor at the New Yorker for several decades, and, based on her book Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, is what I had always imagined copy editors to be before I became a professional writer. If you’ve seen the last season of The Wire, you know the archetype I’m describing: The human dictionary, someone not just familiar with the finer points of grammar and syntax but who revels in those distinctions, and thus becomes both indispensable to harried writers who might not find the right word or who err in their usage as well as the sworn enemy of the same writers who, like me, would prefer to believe that their copy was perfect when it was filed.
Norris does a lot of that, it seems, and some of those language quirks serve as the starting points here for individual chapters that meander through questions of usage or linguistic evolution but also through fun or interesting stories from her forty years at one of the most revered English-language publications. The New Yorker has published works, fiction and non-fiction, from some of this country’s most esteemed writers, and Norris was able to edit and work with many of them, with her working relationship with Philip Roth earning significant mention in the book (a weird coincidence, since I just read a fictionalized version of a romantic relationship with him in Asymmetry). The publication is also well-known for maintaining standards on language, grammar, and orthography that, depending on your perspective, are either a noble attempt to fight the erosion of linguistic excellence or pretentious prescriptivism that leads people to say grammar is just something white people like. (I admit to sympathizing with the former sentiment more than the latter, but even the New Yorker loses me by putting a diaeresis in coöperation.) George Saunders has praised her editing, as has longtime editor in chief David Remnick.
The best parts of Confessions of a Comma Queen, for me at least, are the anecdotes about battles, internal and internecine, over editing decisions. I often answer people on social media or in chats by saying that “words have meanings,” a bromide that I think gets at a deeper truth: any modern language has a panoply of ways to describe just about anything, and in most cases these different words or phrases will differ slightly in denotation or connotation, so that in most cases there will be one or two optimal choices. Yet the subjectivity of language and its limitations in expressing the variety of human thought also mean that rational, intelligent people may even disagree over which words are the right ones. Norris details some of those battles and even more trivial ones, devoting much of one chapter to the hyphen, another to the semicolon (perhaps my favorite punctuation mark, but one she derides), and of course quite a bit to the comma, although I think she ultimately comes down on the wrong side of the debate over the serial, Oxford, or Harvard comma.
I only had one real quibble with Between You and Me and it might not matter if you read the printed version. I listened to the audiobook, and Norris’ attempts to read Noah Webster’s writings, which used ?, a character known as the medial s that looks like an f but actually isn’t one, comes off like she’s mocking someone with a speech impediment; treating that character as an f is funny once, as a joke, but Norris carries it too far while ignoring the fact that it’s not an f at all. That gag slightly sours another wonderful chapter that explains how much of even contemporary English usage derives from decisions Webster made unilaterally on what was “proper” English, as well as other changes he advocated that never caught on. It’s a great read for the stickler in your life, or any writer/editor who might enjoy reading about the editing life and culture of one of America’s great and most distinctive magazines.
Next up: John Banville’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea.
