Bryan Fischer corrects The New Yorker's punctuation
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In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Jane Mayer has a profile of Bryan Fischer ("BULLY PULPIT: An evangelist talk-show host’s campaign to control the Republican Party", The New Yorker, 6/18/2012), which starts this way:
Tupelo, Mississippi, is best known as the birthplace of Elvis Presley, and his childhood home remains the town’s top attraction. Another local performer, however, has recently garnered national attention. For two hours every weekday, a broadcaster named Bryan Fischer hosts “Focal Point,” a popular Christian radio talk show. He is one of the country’s most vocal opponents of what he calls “the homosexual-rights movement.” As he puts it, “A rational culture that cares about its people will, in fact, discriminate against adultery, pedophilia, rape, bestiality, and, yes, homosexual behavior.” His goal is to make this view the official stance of the Republican Party.
This profile has gotten some serious uptake in the intellectual media. More than a week before the magazine's cover date, Mayer's article was featured in Politico's Playbook column ("Mike Allen's must-read briefing on what's driving the day in Washington", 6/10/2012); it provoked Irin Carmon to ask on Salon "Does Bryan Fischer Matter?" ( 6/11/2012); and it was summarized on 6/13/2012 in a post on Right Wing Watch (Josh Glasstetter, "Bryan Fischer in the New Yorker: Extreme, Rigid and the Product of a Broken Home"). Terry Gross interviewed Jane Mayer on NPR's Fresh Air ("Radio's Bryan Fischer Tries Pushing Romney Right", 6/14/2012 [transcript]). And there was an enthusiastic plug by Andrew Sullivan (6/15/2012):
If you haven't read Jane Mayer's new profile of Fischer, do yourself a favor. Things I learned: Fischer does not believe HIV causes AIDS, believes that Muslims should be barred from immigration, and that non-Christians "have no First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion." When Mitt Romney had to face down this raving lunatic, in the case of his openly gay national security spokesman, Ric Grenell, Romney blinked. That's worth knowing.
Bryan Fischer responded on the air, in a 13-minute segment that American Family Radio posted on its YouTube channel ("New Yorker profile on me shockingly bad exercise in pseudo journalism 06/11/12"). He asserts that Mayer got some specific facts wrong, of course. But ironically, given The New Yorker's strong (if confused) editorial stance in favor of arbitrary and ill-defined prescriptive rules, his biggest complaint is about Mayer's misuse of punctuation:
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And there's one other thing, there's one other thing that it- that's it- it's just- this is laughably bad. I mean this is juvenile, this is like something that you would get in- in a middle school journalism class. Somebody would turn this in as an assignment in- in a junior high English class.
And one of the things you can tell is the number of times that the writer used exclamation points uh uh at- at the tag end of quotes from me. Uh and I went through and circled them Let's see, there is- I- let me count them up real quick — one, two, three, four, five, six, uh of these exclamation points, {laughs} to uh you know make me uh look more, I don't know, I don't know what- what the uh what the intent was there.
But you know when I- when I wrote columns for the Idaho Statesman — this is the largest newspaper in the state of Idaho — this is an Idaho newspaper — this is not an elite New York publication like The New Yorker And when I would turn in columns, where I would have a quote of mine and I wanted to emphasize it, and I would put an exclamation point at the end, they'd take it out.
It was not considered journalistically proper to put exclamation points after quotations, even if- even in- even if they're your own. and even if YOU wanted it in there to uh put some emphasis upon what YOU were saying.
And yet here is a- a- a toney elite publication and- and ladies and gentlemen, they have journalistic standards, they have editorial standards that are below the editorial and journalistic standards of the Idaho Stateman. Man, I am telling you, this- this author ought to be ashamed of herself.
Fischer might have quoted scriptural prescription (in this case, of course, Strunk & White): “The exclamation mark is to be reserved for use after true exclamations or commands.” But here at Language Log, our approach to questions of usage is a descriptivist one — we like to base our usage advice on observation and analysis of the actual practice of appropriate models of writing and speaking. So I'll start by looking at the use of exclamation points in the profile under discussion, and then compare some other examples of elite journalistic practice.
Fischer's on-air count of exclamation points got up to six — I used the computer to scan Mayer's 7900-word article, and found 12, all at the end of quotes attributed to Fischer himself. A couple of these are plausibly "true exclamations" ("Wow!"), but most of them are fairly ordinary statements ("We need some clarification!", “If one of them is gay and it’s genetically caused, the other one ought to be gay one hundred per cent of the time!”).
What about some other other examples from the same source? In the same issue of the New Yorker, Jill Lepore's 5000-word article on "The Supreme Court and the struggle for judicial independence" has two exclamation points, both arguably in "true exclamations or commands":
[FDR] met with Holmes, who told him, “You are in a war, Mr. President, and in a war there is only one rule, ‘Form your battalion and fight!’ ”
In another 5–4 decision, Hughes upheld F.D.R.’s agenda, leading one of the [Justices known as the four] horsemen to burst out, “The Constitution is gone!”—a comment so unseemly that it was stricken from the record.
Also in the 6/18/2012 issue, Ryan Lizza's 9500-word article on "The Second Term: What would Obama do if reëlected?" has three exclamation points, all in quotations from David Plouffe. Two are in a reiterated phrase that might count as a "true exclamation", and one is in a command:
“All the paperwork’s done!” he said. “We know what the options are. It’s all been done! It’s not like they’re starting from scratch.”
“We’ve also ended a period of war while taking out our leading terrorist enemies,” he added. “Think about that! That’s a pretty important book of business, and I think that’s the legacy he’d like to leave.”
Turning to another relevant elite-media outlet, the online summary of Jane Mayer's appearance on Fresh Air is around 1500 words, and has no exclamation points; NPR's official transcript of Terry Gross's interview with Mayer is about 6400 words, with no exclamation points.
I conclude that Fischer has a prima facie case for his view that Mayer went above and beyond the usual norms of elite-journalism punctuation "to uh you know make me uh look more, I don't know …"
More than 80 years ago, James Thurber summarized elite writers' traditional attitude towards this matter, in the section of his Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage dealing with "Exclamation Points and Colons":
I shall cite, to begin with, a few general "don'ts" for exclamation marks. One general "don't" could well cover the whole thing, for the exclamation mark is never actually necessary, but the shock of giving them all up at once might prove fatal to those unfortunate writers who have become addicts.
And, though it's not strictly relevant, I can't resist quoting more of Thurber's advice:
I think that Fowler in his Modern English Usage does not discriminate as carefully as he should between what is proper and safe in exclamations and what is proper and dangerous. He makes several groupings of proper usages, one of them being "You miserable coward!, You little dear!" Obviously there's a difference in possible ultimate effect here. The former could not very easily lead to a suit for libel, but the latter could easily drift into a suit for breach of promise, and is therefore not safe. Of his other groupings of recommended usages I should most assuredly warn any gentleman against writing to any woman any part of the list which Fowler gives as No. 4. This includes: "What a difference it makes!, What I suffered!, How I love you!" If one is going to use a whole group, I'd say take his No. 5, which is, in full: "Not another word!, If only I could!, That it should come to this!, Much care you!, Pop goes the weasel!, A fine friend you have been!" That is not only safe — it leans over backwards. All correspondence would probably be ended after such a letter, and that is always rather more desirable than deplorable.
Actually, now that I think of it, the effect on Fischer seems to have been along the lines ("All correspondence would probably be ended") that Thurber suggests:
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And remember, that's one of the things that we're about, and by the way this has convinced me, this is it. Uh this is it. {laughs} I am never, ever, going to cooperate with an organ in the out of the mainstream media for a profile on me, ever again.
For lagniappe, here's the cartoon that the New Yorker's editors placed in the middle of Mayer's piece:
Coincidence? Maybe. New Yorker cartoons often seem to be thematically connected in some way to the articles they happen to be associated with. Perhaps it's just that the magazine has a limited inventory of themes, each of which can plausibly be taken as a commentary on any of the others.
Update — For evidence that modern prescriptivists also consider exclamation points somewhat infra dig, and that using exclamation points in transcribing someone's remarks might not be a friendly or even neutral gesture, here's Lynne Truss:
Everyone knows the exclamation mark — or exclamation point, as it is known in America. It comes at the end of a sentence, is unignorable and hopelessly heavy-handed, and is known in the newspaper world as a screamer, a gasper, a startler or (sorry) a dog's cock. Here's one! And here's another! In humorous writing, the exclamation mark is the equivalent of canned laughter (F. Scott Fitzgerald — that well-known knockabout gag-man — said it was like laughing at your own jokes), and I can attest there is only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in.
Update #2 — with respect to one of the two cases where Fischer challenges Mayer's facts, the third party concerned, Dennis Mansfield, sides with Mayer. Given the bizarre misunderstandings rampant in Joan Acocella's review of Henry Hitching's The Language Wars, I had begun to wonder whether The New Yorker's vaunted fact-checkers might have been fired in a cost-cutting move, or perhaps are simply not called on to check the facts when ideological commitments are on the table. So it was a relief to learn that Mayer got this one right.
Ben Zimmer said,
June 16, 2012 @ 9:11 am
I note that you made your own typographical tweak by giving the title of Ryan Lizza's article as "The Second Term: What would Obama do if re-elected?" New Yorker style dictates that the word is spelled reëlected. I tried reading Lizza's article but gave up after the fifth diaeresis.
[(myl) What actually happened is that I cut-and-pasted the title of Lizza's article into my post, but the diaeresis failed to make the journey intact, coming out as some sort of typographical splotch. So when I finally proof-read the result, I miscorrected "reëlected" to "re-elected" without realizing that I was being typographically innovative. I'll restore the original…]
Mary Bull said,
June 16, 2012 @ 9:35 am
@MYL This LL piece does delight me! I have the June 18 NY in hand, but had not yet read any of it beyond the ToC and "The Mail." Shall peruse all the articles you cite here very soon. And proceed to see if I can find a copy of the Thurber book, which somehow had escaped my notice before now. Side note: Is the last name of the "Fischer" under discussion spelled "Fisher," as in your headline, or "Fischer" as in the body of the post. I suspect that "Fisher" resulted from a mischievous keyboard's dropping the "c" rather than from some inside info you may have that he's really a "Fisher."
[(myl) I was just careless in typing up the first draft of this article. His name is spelled "Fischer".]
Mary Bull said,
June 16, 2012 @ 9:37 am
Wish I had proofread my own comment more carefully and placed a question mark at the end of my question. Ah, well — can't even blame my own mischievous keyboard for that. :(
Mary Bull said,
June 16, 2012 @ 9:55 am
And now, with Ben Zimmer's comment now showing above mine and "reelected" restored, I note with pleasure that the "Fisher" I saw in the post's headline is now "Fischer." Consistency reigneth at LL!
[(myl) Yes, we (or at least I) have always depended on the editorial kindness of strangers (and friends).]
Mary Bull said,
June 16, 2012 @ 10:11 am
[(Mary Bull)] I suspect that "Fisher" resulted from a mischievous keyboard's dropping the "c" rather than from some inside info you may have that he's really a "Fisher."
[(myl) I was just careless in typing up the first draft of this article. His name is spelled "Fischer".]
Thanks, MYL, for the explanation. I'm sad to report that my search for a copy of Thurber's Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage has so far come up empty-handed at Amazon.com, Alibris, and Daedalus Books. Shall keep on looking, though. (Sorry that my command of HTML code is failing me this morning and I can't italicize the book title, at least, for the moment.)
[(myl) Between January 5 and December 21, 1929, Thurber wrote a series of eight articles in The New Yorker, under the heading "Our Modern English Usage". Dave Lull gives the bibliographical details here. These articles were reprinted in The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities, 1931, under the heading "Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage"; and a version can be found online here.]
Mary Bull said,
June 16, 2012 @ 10:32 am
@MYL Oho, Google & Wikipedia are indeed my friends! James Thurber's "Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage" is Part 3 of The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities. And I'm able to order that from Amazon.com. Thanks again for introducing me to another book by Thurber — like so many others of his fans, I first enjoyed him in his New Yorker pieces and cartoons, lo these many years ago.
Mary Bull said,
June 16, 2012 @ 10:34 am
@MYL Thanks also for your enlightening reply, which I read only after I'd posted my report about locating the book via Wikipedia.
Mary Bull said,
June 16, 2012 @ 11:00 am
@MYL I've placed an order with an Amazon.com Marketplace Seller for a used paperback copy of the reprinted compendium, and now I can't resist thanking you again for the link to the actual online text, which I'm currently reading, deep in a reconsideration of "who and whom." http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2009/12/thurber-tonight-ladies-and-gentlemens.html
I too am grateful for the kindness of strangers (and friends) — can't help feeling that you fit into both categories for me, though I've never met you in person but merely been enjoying your posts at LL for the past few years.
I do look forward to holding a print copy of the book in my hands. There's something so satisfying about having books available, even when the Internet connection fails.
mollymooly said,
June 16, 2012 @ 11:03 am
On more minor typo: Fischer says "Idaho Statesman", not "Idaho Stateman".
How often is an imperative followed with an exclamation mark?
– English: 5%
– French: 50%
– Latin conjugation tables: 100%
D.O. said,
June 16, 2012 @ 11:36 am
Is Mr. Fischer uptalker or has some other (unusual) way of pronouncing the ends of sentences that might have led to the impression that he is unusually expressive?
Brian said,
June 16, 2012 @ 12:50 pm
He's the host of an evangelist talk-show, so I think "unusually expressive" is pretty much covered right there.
Henry Clay said,
June 16, 2012 @ 1:15 pm
Jane Mayer's previous article for the New Yorker on media consultant Larry McCarthy contains roughly the same number of non-exclamatory exclamation marks in quotes. A previous article on whistle-blower/accused spy Thomas Drake, with whom one presumes Mayer's politics is more sympathetic, contains only five exclamation points in quotes, but always in second-hand quotes or quotes from Drake's opponents, never when quoting Drake himself. I strongly suspect a more in-depth study would confirm Fischer's accusation that Mayer uses this punctuation as negative commentary.
By the way, I don't believe that saying something isn't "journalistically proper" is at all the same as prescriptivism. Journalism has its own rules regarding objectivity. Calling somebody an asshole may be grammatically correct for even the most hardened prescriptivist, but most of us would agree that it is not proper in professional journalism.
Mona Williams said,
June 16, 2012 @ 1:52 pm
Hungarians often use an exclamation point in the salutation of a letter, which I think is a charming custom. I once got an email from someone in Hungary with my name written this way, and it pretty much made my day.
Maureen said,
June 16, 2012 @ 2:46 pm
A lot of people from evangelical, Southern backgrounds seem to have a speech pattern during orations that is almost the opposite of the Valley girl speech endings. They end each sentence at a climax. It's good for letting people know that you've finished a sentence, since their sentences can run pretty long.
The guys who do this usually are tenors or high baritones. Don't know if there's a connection.
Spectre-7 said,
June 16, 2012 @ 2:56 pm
I'm so glad I clicked on the image. That was a very entertaining bit of comic history, and I'm left thinking about adding an exclamation point to my name.
Sili said,
June 16, 2012 @ 4:56 pm
Some of us happen to love the diaeresis. The only problem I have with the word, is that it isn't spelt with one.
Sili said,
June 16, 2012 @ 5:02 pm
But I do find it depressing that journalist does not know how to switch off autocorrect or update the dictionary in Word.
Perhaps it's for the best that they don't get paid by the hour.
цarьchitect said,
June 16, 2012 @ 5:41 pm
Who could forget Tyson Homosexual? I'm glad that got mentioned.
Cirret said,
June 16, 2012 @ 6:03 pm
@Mona Williams: Esperanto also, if I recall correctly:
Saluton!
Jeff Carney said,
June 16, 2012 @ 6:29 pm
As a freshman writing teacher, I regularly see a hyper-abundance of exclamation marks, often in groups of three!!! This is one where I really think I do my students a favor by pointing out that many adult readers (professors, employers) will not take such writing seriously. I would ill-serve my students if I just let it go.
The most productive solution is to comment in the margin that they [my students] are no longer in middle school. Seriously, no comment has ever been so effective.
Renato Montes said,
June 16, 2012 @ 6:59 pm
@Mona Williams: Germans used to do it in the past too, but using a comma is more common now.
Chris said,
June 16, 2012 @ 9:14 pm
Diaeresis used with reëlected? Who is going to pronounce that as reel-ec-ted?
D.O. said,
June 16, 2012 @ 10:36 pm
@Chris. If you encounter an English word without already knowing how to pronounce it , your best hope is only an educated guess.
Katje said,
June 17, 2012 @ 7:38 am
If I see exclamation points used in direct quotes, this suggests to me that the speaker shouted or at least spoke the words in question more loudly than the portions without exclamation points. I would think that not using them in that situation would be less accurate, but then again, I'm not a journalist.
Robin said,
June 17, 2012 @ 7:01 pm
@Jeff Carney: While I, too, personally feel that it is somehow improper to use more than one exclamation mark in a row in formal writing, and would also advise students not to do it, the rather ironic thing is that I often see highly educated middle-aged people doing it in professional emails.
JO'N said,
June 18, 2012 @ 7:16 am
I don't have time for a real breakfast experiment ™ this morning, but from a casual perusal of Jane Mayer's work on-line, she seems to have a much greater exclamation point frequency than other authors. In her last nine full-form articles before the one under discussion, there were 49 exclamation points in 68,027 words, for a frequency of 0.072%. In this article, there were 12 exclamation points in 8063 words, for a frequency of 0.149%. Chi-square gives a p-value of 0.036, which is significant, though there might be other other effects I haven't considered (such as the number of direct quote tokens in the articles) that would model exclamation point use better. Overall, though, the author simply uses exclamation points in reported quotes pretty regularly.
[(myl) In an earlier comment, Henry Clay offered some evidence that Ms. Mayer might deploy her exclamation points for ideological effect:
Jane Mayer's previous article for the New Yorker on media consultant Larry McCarthy contains roughly the same number of non-exclamatory exclamation marks in quotes. A previous article on whistle-blower/accused spy Thomas Drake, with whom one presumes Mayer's politics is more sympathetic, contains only five exclamation points in quotes, but always in second-hand quotes or quotes from Drake's opponents, never when quoting Drake himself. I strongly suspect a more in-depth study would confirm Fischer's accusation that Mayer uses this punctuation as negative commentary.
This is perhaps enough to motivate a more extensive study of exclamation points in her body of work, and perhaps in New Yorker features more generally. But I don't have time to do it this morning either.]
Dennis Paul Himes said,
June 18, 2012 @ 9:56 am
After seeing that the title of this post mentioned punctuation and reading the sentence, "Tupelo, Mississippi, is best known as the birthplace of Elvis Presley, and his childhood home remains the town’s top attraction." I was sure that the subject of the post was going to be commas. Specifically, the comma after "Mississippi".
KevinM said,
June 18, 2012 @ 10:37 am
@Mona Williams "Hungarians often use an exclamation point in the salutation of a letter"
Also alien invaders. "People of Earth!"
David Walker said,
June 18, 2012 @ 2:20 pm
I thought the quoted paragraph had too many commas, but perhaps not. It had no exclamation points, though.
Sili said,
June 18, 2012 @ 3:33 pm
The same people who for a long time pronounced "albeit" /ˈɔːlbɛɪt/.
THE OTHER SLANT: Evangelical Radio Host Bryan Fischer says The New Yorker Got His Story Wrong : The Slant said,
May 29, 2013 @ 2:01 pm
[…] which is not a member of the vast right wing conspiracy by the way, has a blog called the “Language Log.” They got wind of the fact that I had complained about her profligate use of exclamation points, so […]