"None of us are hip"

An interview with Allan Siegal, language czar of the New York Times and editor of its new style and usage guide.

By Susan Lehman

Nov. 5, 1999 | The plural of "octopus" is "octopuses." "Bra" is preferred to "brassiere." And don't confuse "egg roll" (the food) with "egg rolling" (the frolic).

This and other useful information is available in the new edition of the New York Times' "Manual of Style and Usage" (Times Books). The manual -- which includes entries for "hypertext," "wannabe," "barrio," "biological parents," "gay" and "Kwanzaa" -- provides a nice look at the way in which language, at least in the paper of record, reflects social change.

The Times' apparent sensitivity to identity issues, for example, is so sweeping the new manual even cautions against possible offense to voodoo practitioners. ("Voodoo," notes the Times' stylists, "is a religion with many followers in Africa, and the West Indies, not to mention the United States" who "are offended by disparaging uses of voodoo to mean irrational beliefs.")

Religious awe is on the downswing, the manual suggests. While the earlier edition said He, Him, His, Thee and Thou should be capitalized when reference is made to God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost or Allah, the revised edition says lowercase will do. The perceptible increase in attention paid "East Hampton" in recent years is reflected in a fuller entry in the new volume. And what, in the last 23 years, has given rise to increased use of the terms "horsy, horsier, horsiest," an entry included in the new but not the old volume?

Subtitled "The Official Style Guide Used by the Writers and Editors of the World's Most Authoritative Newspaper," the manual offers a vivid glimpse of how the paper sees itself. As the introduction suggests, readers will here find a window into the Times' character in entries on Corrections, Dateline Integrity, Fairness and Accuracy, and Obscenity, Vulgarity and Profanity. (Times junkies will thrill to find that the paper violated its virtual ban on obscenity and vulgarity on just three occasions -- during Watergate, when it published transcripts of White House conversations; again in 1991, when it published transcripts and articles generated by Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court; and then again last year, when the Times published the Starr Report.)

Times assistant managing editor and style czar Allan Siegal co-authored the manual with senior editor William G. Connolly. Siegal spoke with Salon Media about the Times and its new style guide.

The new manual has an entry for "Bed Bath & Beyond." What exactly is the criterion for inclusion?

The criterion is: Are people working here likely to trip over something, a name, its spelling or punctuation? In many cases they already have.

"Spelling checker" is OK but not "spell-check." How arbitrary are these decisions?

That decision was pretty arbitrary. It was a tone decision. We don't like to sound staccato. We don't like to sound like a telegram. And we don't want to sound like technical people.

We're writing for a middle audience that is neither very hip and very technical nor very stodgy and very hyper-traditional. We want to sound like conversation and "spell-check" sounds like techno-jargon.

Why is "flap," as a noun used to describe fuss or controversy, trite?

Because it trips off the typewriters of too many writers, too much of the time.

The current volume contains a large entry under the word "irony." The older editions had no entry at all. Why, after 23 years, did you decide Times writers needed the lengthy discussion of irony?

We find people using "ironic" and "irony" very loosely too much of the time. In our daily critiques of the paper, we find ourselves telling people, "That's not an irony, it's just a coincidence." Irony doesn't mean, "Hey, isn't that interesting or strange!" So we put it in the book.

Why is "Valium" (absent from the previous volume) included in the new manual, but not "Prozac"?

Prozac probably should have been included. In fact it is very hard with well-known drugs to remember whether the name is a trademark or generic. It has nothing to do with the frequency with which Valium, or for that matter Prozac, is used within the general population. It has to do with how often people come up against it and wonder whether it's capped or not.

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