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> In 2009, the show went completely C.G.I. As much as I love the New Yorker, my fondest hope is that one day the N.Y.C. media will free themselves from whateve
by Stratoscope 9y ago
> In 2009, the show went completely C.G.I.
As much as I love the New Yorker, my fondest hope is that one day the N.Y.C. media will free themselves from whatever repressive authoritarian soul compels them to put those dots in every single acronym and initialism, when the rest of the country abandoned the dots long ago.
They even put them in names that once were initialisms but now are genuine names on their own: they insist on I.B.M. even though the official company name is simply IBM. And F.B.I. even though the FBI's own website calls it the FBI.
As an old ham radio operator, the one that really got me was when they wrote about S.O.S. - when in fact SOS never was an initialism at all! No experienced radio operator would ever have sent "S O S" as three separate letters in Morse code:
dit dit dit (pause) dah dah dah (pause) dit dit dit
("S" is dit dit dit in Morse, and "O" is "dah dah dah".)
SOS has always been a "prosign", that is, a single Morse code unit with no pauses in the middle:
dit dit dit dah dah dah dit dit dit
In fact, SOS is properly written with an overscore above the letters to indicate that it is sent as a single unit. Of course that is not always possible given the limitations of modern typography, but it is never transmitted as if it were the three separate letters "S O S".
Why does the N.Y.C. media follow such an authoritarian rule even when it is factually wrong? It is a mystery to me.
- DavidAdams 9y agoThe New Yorker also insists on typographical affectations such as coöperate and reëlect. Most publications have a "house style." The New Yorker's is particularly eccentric, and I think they like it that way.
- blt 9y agoI used to think this was annoying and snobby, but after seeing the New Yorker deëvolve into a less funny BuzzFeed over the past couple of years, I long for the over-the-top snobbiness of the old New Yorker. At least it was a distinct identity.
- chis 9y agoAre there any magazines that recreate the snobbishness of old New Yorker?
- tomcam 9y agoI think you mean NYC media ;)
- nerfhammer 9y agoIIRC the NYTimes at least used to have a policy where it if you pronounce the acronym out loud as a word it doesn't get periods, but does have periods if it would be said out loud as individual letters. E.g., "Joint NASA - E.S.A. space mission launch", "F.B.I. agents meet at FEMA office". As far as that rule would be concerned SOS is pronounced as letters and not as a word perhaps like "sauce". But I've just seen some clear violations of that rule by them (they don't spell "SAT" test with periods) so maybe I'm misremembering or maybe they've changed it. Similarly to SOS, the letters SAT don't stand for anything, at least not officially anymore.
- gideonparanoid 9y agoThat's the difference between an acronym & an initialism. An acronym is pronounced as a word, but an initialism is just the letters (usually because it cannot be pronounced).
- merraksh 9y ago("S" is dit dit dit in Morse, and "O" is "dah dah dah".) Some old Nokia phone used to have a single-pitched ringtone for text messages that sounded ". . . _ _ . . .", which is Morse code for SMS.
- falsedan 9y ago> Some old Nokia phone The 1100, the most popular phone ever made.