An update to the magazine’s style guide did away with anachronisms like “Web site” and “in-box.” But it was limited to what the staff felt were “lasting” changes.
This week, the top copy editor of The New Yorker announced that the magazine had completed a “reëxamination” of its house style.
A few things were changing. But its dedication to the dieresis — those two little dots that float above certain vowels, beloved by New Yorker editors and almost nobody else — was not.
“For every person who hates the dieresis and feels like it’s precious and pretentious and ridiculous, there’s another person who finds it charming,” Andrew Boynton, the head of the copy department at the magazine, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.
The magazine, which doesn’t look a day over 100, is famous for its attachment to heterodox spelling and punctuation rules. So Mr. Boynton’s decision to announce changes to the style guide in The New Yorker’s daily newsletter on Monday was noteworthy. The revolution arrived in two squat paragraphs containing two diereses, three em dashes and four pairs of parentheses.
The magazine will abandon “Web site,” “in-box,” and “Internet” in favor of the more familiar “website,” “inbox” and “internet.” “Cellphone” will be one word, rather than two.
“Welcome to 1995, you may be thinking,” Mr. Boynton wrote in the announcement, providing an example of another new rule: Thoughts will be italicized in an effort to differentiate them from other text.