Update: Following a gently critical email from Mr. Ekman, we have attempted to recreate his proper use of em and en dashes.

Editors:

William Safire's send-up of "postpartisan" politics and their nomenclature marks a notable improvement on the last major Times entry on the hyphenation beat, Charles McGrath's ill-begotten musings from October 7, "Death-Knell. Or Death Knell." Where McGrath smugly assumed, on the basis of the OED's sudden elimination of 16,000 antiquated hyphens ("bumblebee," "crybaby" — musty forms viscerally awkward in Century 21), the wholesale erosion of the hyphen as such, without regard for context, function, or flavor, Safire is more in tune with the incremental nature of punctuational change: when tentative and new, a term might carry a hyphen, then surrender it with increasing familiarity. McGrath evinced a muted recognition of this process, yet the uptake of his piece — O, controversy! — was, repulsively, that a macro-level flight from the hyphen would prevent new new terms from ever starting out with one.

Safire knows, as McGrath doesn't, that not all hyphens are created equal: the grammatical and the stylistic kinds are simply not subject to the same tectonic forces. His parenthetical is comforting: the just among us, and the strong, speak of ice-cream trucks, hot-dog stands, and, yes, hat-trick hyphenated usages. The sort of hyphens that birth compound adjectives belong to a qualitatively different category from those cobbling together neologisms; if they are to disappear, it will be for reasons unaligned with the puncture of "water-beds."

Yet Safire is entirely too content to guard his impish dance on "post[-]partisanship" behind the slogan of "style, not grammar." A slew of factors constrain our punctuation, liberating though the mirage of free choice may seem. Of course the hyphen in "post-partisan" is immaterial; the hyphen is really no more there in any essential way than the hyphen that could crop up at a line break between syllables. But this ambiguous presence does not authorize the term's division into "post partisan": while the base "partisan" may trace its lineage to the Latin, it is not a term directly plucked from Latin in the way that "partum," another of Safire's examples, most assuredly is. Foreign terms remain unhyphenated — a priori, bona fide, and so on — even when modifying; they are outside the realm of our punctuational caprice.

Safire seems so eager, in fact, to tie the lesson into a neat hat trick and be done with it (or simply blockaded by a word limit — shame in either case) that he misfires irrevocably when it comes to the 2006 Times quote on Barack Obama. The third term, "post-baby boom," is indeed awkward: the meaning is distorted and divorced from the intent, and we're left squawking about "post-babies." Certainly, this "hyphen before a phrase" does not accomplish everything we had hoped.

But it happens that we already have a punctuation mark for precisely such a situation: the en dash. En dashes operate in three main contexts: ranges (2001–08; A–Z), substitutes for hyphens when multiple words are linked on one side (post–baby boom; pre–World War II; trans fat–free), and the non-hierarchical yet dynamic linkage of terms in the spirit of "and," "with," "to," or "versus" (see Safire's egregious fourth paragraph: it should be "Ford–Carter," just as it would be "U.S.–Mexico," "Giants–Patriots," "military–industrial," and so on). Longer than a hyphen but shorter than an em dash, the kind that signals a pause in speech, the en dash is a powerful tool, albeit one foreign to The Times (and, unthinkably, even the Magazine — glossies across the board employ it). So what we are left with is not a question of hyphen versus no hyphen – the care[-]free situation of "postpartisan" – but rather hyphen versus en dash. Safire misdiagnoses the source of "post-baby boom"'s awkwardness. For intuitive reasons, no one would consider writing "postbaby boom." His following sentence, regarding the Washington news media, is an utter non sequitur; it operates along an unrelated axis.

Whether the fundamental blame rests on Safire or his crusty (copy)editors might seem purely academic, but the fifth paragraph dispels any doubts: the author appears in willful oblivion of the fertile crossroads of style and grammar, and ultimately unconcerned with questions of the distribution of meaning, a fact which alone disqualifies him from writing on this topic in the first place. Safire's introduction of "bi-partisanship" quietly presents a foil to his stated ruminations on the "post-partisan" condition. The problem is the "-ship" bringing up the rear. When only one hyphen lurks in an expression, it always imposes a bifurcation in how we parse the meaning. Here, "bipartisanship," unhyphenated, carries a special ambiguity. Imagine a silenced hyphen before "ship": we have three units of meaning to reckon with, and as a result the hyphen after "bi" is not purely stylistic. "Bi-partisanship," strictly, denotes a state of two partisanships, not a state of bipartisan politics or feeling. ("Postpartisanship" is relatively unproblematic: the situation described is both a situation ("ship") in which a type of politics called "postpartisan" prevail and a time or situation past the concept of "partisanship.") If we are committed for stylistic reasons always to insert a hyphen after a prefix, and if we also mean to describe a state of bipartisan attitudes, then perhaps an en dash would be most appropriate: bi–partisan-ship.

This may be moot beneath the paper's tyranny of typesetting, a consistently vague and undemocratic campaign to foist the hyphen upon en dash–appropriate contexts, but it is not insignificant in a broader sense. Safire has so assimilated the publication's ideological apparatus — if there is no en dash, all is permitted — as to reproduce similar fraught hierarchies within apparently neutral illustrative examples. He may himself write this off as so much speculation, a mere artifact of The Times' punctuational inertia, but this would be to surrender responsibility for what amounts not simply to a slackening, but to a new and frightful hierarchy of meaning.

Peter Ekman
Queens

Postpartisan [NYT]
Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location [NYT]
Earlier: 'Times' Excited By Proper Punctuation

I enjoyed reading Tim Page's essay on living with Asperger's syndrome: the insomnia, the social puzzlement, the obsession with various subjects to the exclusion of more common ones - all are very familiar to me ("Parallel Play," August 20th). Then came this description: "In the late nineteen-seventies, I saw a ragged, haunted man who spent urgent hours dodging the New York transit police to trace the dates and lineage of the Hapsburg nobility on the walls of subway stations." I was the gentlemen in question; although I didn't care about clothes, I don't think I was that ragged. I want to assure Mr. Page that I was never homeless or institutionalized (as he guessed), and I got only one ticket. Mr. Page and I had other things in common; like him, I was at the premiere of Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" at Town Hall. Unlike Mr. Page, I did not find this particular music's structure all-engrossing; I preferred to dance to it. At one performance of Reich's music at the U.S. Custom House, I danced alone around and around the central musicians. For someone as acutely self-conscious as I had been, this seemed a moment of glorious emergence, of living my own life in everyone else's world.

John Yohalem
New York City

[O]ver the space of a little more than a generation, do the following: Shrink the physical footprint of the newspaper and its tabloid-sized sections (the Book Review and New York Times Magazine). Reduce the number of columns from eight to six. Downgrade the intellectual level of the newspaper as a whole. Degrade the quality of writing, so that it is uneven and unworthy of the newspaper's heritage. Destroy the excellence of the Sunday Arts and Leisure by embracing a puerile "multiculturalism" and declaring that classical music and pop music are equivalent in artistic and spiritual significance.

Letters: "Tiptoeing Around the Family Business" [NYT]

Time

Previously:
Isn't It Ironic?

The New York Times reports that "a group of Journal reporters based in China urged the Bancroft family in a letter to reject Mr. Murdoch's bid." The letter can be found here. It echoes concerns voiced by James H. Ottaway, Jr., whose family owns about six per cent of Dow Jones. Times of London editor Robert Thomson—expected to have an advisory position on the Journal should Murdoch's bid succeed—responded with a letter of his own which called the claim "a challenge to the integrity of the journalists at The Times and to me personally."

Former Times Hong Kong correspondent Jonathan Mirsky claims that "When Murdoch wants to interfere, he will. If there's supposed to be a China wall [separating corporate executives from editorial decisions], he'll ignore it." There's precedent: Flashback to this 2006 interview with former Page Sixer and champion liver-damager Ian Spiegelman. In response to a question about which Murdoch friends the gossip gang was ordered to "dance around or flatter," Spiegelman said, "The People's Republic of China. One time I was looking into an item about a Chinese diplomat and a strip club when word came from somewhere up above that China had carte blanche. The message I got was more or less, "If you mention Chinese, you'd better be ordering lunch." (Also Nicole Kidman, but we imagine that will be less of an issue for the Journal.)

Previously: Rupert Murdoch Loves Dow Jones, Whitefish

"Perhaps Katie Roiphe is thinking like a college student because her life is not much more complicated that a college student's," Linda writes in a letter to the magazine.

She has a child (many women her age worry about their prospects of becoming a mother) and her child's father is ready and able to participate in his daughter's life. Lucky Katie also has the ability to build a new house (many divorced women cannot even afford to stay in their old house). And she has an established career. Many divorced women with real financial and social concerns also make it through just fine—not because they are overgrown adolescents but because they are adults. —Linda Friedner Cowen, Great Neck, N.Y.

The Great Escape [NYM]

Previously: Letters To 'Interview' Continue To Amuse, Astound, Appall

Katherine Taylor is afraid of being considered a writer of chick lit ["Farrar Thinks Pink," Spencer Morgan, The New York World, March 12]. To establish her seriousness, she tells The Observer that my novel Indecision "was ridiculously simple" and suggests that "had it been a girl who'd written it, it would have had the pinkest cover in the world." I wonder why, if Ms. Taylor feels like that, she allowed her editor to send me the galleys of her novel, asking for a blurb. I didn't provide one—though I read enough of Ms. Taylor's book to understand her anxiety about being taken seriously.

Benjamin Kunkel
Manhattan

Previously: Does 'Interview' Invent Its Letters To The Editor?

This week, we check in with Veronica Buckman, a religious, conservative-minded mother of four from Alpharetta, Georgia. Ms. Buckman grew concerned when she read the magazine's feature on college porn mags two weeks ago, and she wanted to let other parents know that they ought to do a lot of research before they shell out 100 grand for their kids' education. Ms. Buckman was positively delightful when we reached her on the phone this afternoon, and explained to us with genuine warmth and conviction that although she has no problem with naked bodies or adolescent rebellion, she has reservations about any university administration that would fund pornography.

Our interview after the jump.

Why did you write this letter to the New York Times Magazine?
I consider myself conservative, but I'm very open-minded and I'm actually kind of a realist about society and the shades of gray out there. But with this, it was more a personal sort of thing, in that I have a child in college, I have two more going to college soon, and I work as a volunteer in the college and career center at my kid's high school. Those who don't know yet have children, they may think it's all funny and in good fun, this article in the New York Times, but when it comes to actually paying for college, well, it's very expensive. I wanted to let them know, these parents, that we can use the very tools the kids are using—the computer, the internet—and we can dig deeply into the websites of the colleges themselves.

Your letter was pretty subtle. What were you trying to say?
I wasn't casting judgment upon the young people who are doing these sorts of things, per se, although I sort of was. I'm not sure I approve of it. Even though Harvard is probably the best learning institution we have in America, some people might not want their students in that sort of environment, when those things are approved by the administration. Meaning the pornography.

In the letter, you call yourself an "uptight" parent. Why did you call yourself that?
I'm actually not uptight at all. That's actually the funny thing. I'm actually not uptight at all. Listening to my kids' music, I think it's great. I live in the South. I live in the hip hop capital of the country. Well, one of them. I'm open to different kinds of art and culture. I think the human body is beautiful. I have nothing against nudity. But nudity and pornography are not the same thing. I'm trying to bring my kids up, especially my daughters, to be virtuous.

So you like the rap your kids listen to?
I like to know what's going on with the kids. I think being a little radical, a little outside the box, those are good things and that's what you're supposed to do in college. I don't have any problem with nudity or people, um, learning about each other. But when a school starts paying for pornography, that's where I draw the line. And I think other parents would do.

At the end of your letter you say that a college newspaper is a "great way to get the 'feel' of a school," and "feel" is in quotations. Was that a joke on purpose?
I did that, yes. Again, I was trying to be subtle and let people know that I understood. You get the feel of the school by reading what's going on. By reading the crime reports. What are the kids writing about? What are they talking about in their school? That's what I want to know. What are they worried about? That's how you get a feel for the school.

But "feel" was a joke you were making, about the pornography.
Sort of. But then again it wasn't. Just like "uptight." I'm uptight but I'm not uptight. I'm just a regular mom, trying to do what's best for my kids.

In this week's issue, a 54-year-old writer from Jackson Heights named Eric Rudolph objects to a claim made by reporter Arthur Lubow in his Feb. 25 cover story on photographer Jeff Wall. It was an aesthetic complaint, so bear with us!

The letter, not online:

Your article refers to 'the grainy, blurry pictures of Robert Frank, Weegee, Cartier-Bresson and other great documentary photographers.' But most of their pictures not grainy or blurry. Quite the contrary. All were dedicated craftsmen who worked to produce the very best images possible, often under less than ideal conditions. In fact, Weegee worked mainly in large format (4-by-5-inch negatives) and with flash; both of these approaches tend to reduce grain and blur.

So, the New York Times Magazine... how did you feel when you heard they'd be printing your letter?
They informed me by email that they were probably going to do it. And I thought that that was good. Because the point that was made in the article that I refuted was pretty ill-informed.

Had you ever had a letter printed before? Were you excited?
No. I'm a writer, so it's not that big a deal. I write about photography, and I find that when people cover the subject in non-photographic publications they just don't know what they're talking about. To call the photographs of Robert Frank, Weegee, Cartier-Bresson "grainy and blurry" tells me the author of the article has never looked at one, or that he doesn't know what grain and blur are. I just don't like it when I see ill-informed things, so I just knocked off a quick note to them, and I was quite pleased that they chose to run it because it makes a very relevant point.

Where were you when you wrote the letter?
I was just at home in Jackson Heights, looking at the article, kind of wondering why they were making such a big deal out of this. It was with my Mac Notebook computer and wireless, sitting wherever in the house, a real quick, off the cuff email.

Did the Times people edit it?
They took a little bit out. It was quite short. At the end of my letter, I said that I don't know why the writer of the article needed to denigrate these great masters in order to champion this guy Jeff Wall.

So you wrote that in right after you read the article, or did you think about it for a while?
It might have been a little while later. I was just thinking, "he's so wrong about that!" I got the feeling that the point of the article was that what this guy Jeff Wall is doing is new and happening and exciting, and that these dusty old black and white photographers are so boring and yesterday.

Are you a professional writer, or do you have another job?
I'm a writer. I was the East coast contributing editor to American Cinematographer from '97 to 2003. And I wrote for PDN [Photo District News] extensively. Now I'm focusing on writing for consumer magazines.

Do you take pictures yourself?
Yes. Black and white mainly— what you would call street photography. I'm mainly interested in black and white.

Today, we called up 67-year-old Jane Janis from New Canaan, Connecticut, who wrote to the Times about a magazine feature published a few weeks ago about a girl and her two autistic brothers.

The letter (not yet online):

Karen Olsson's article (Feb. 18) brought us right into the daily lives of the Perry family. Tarrah is to be admired for the way she has handled having autistic twin brothers. She's a wonderful resource for her mother. I only take exception to her telling her mother, while riding in a car with the whole family, that the boys needed a shower because they smelled really bad. Her brother Jason reacted exactly like a normal teen when he almost punched her. Her comments to her mother should have been made in private.

You had a letter published in the New York Times Magazine today. How did that make you feel?
Surprised. I was surprised.

Did you know in advance?
They emailed me back saying they might, after I sent it.

Why did you write it?
I just was kind of caught up in the feeling of reading that article. I thought it was a great article. I thought it was extremely well-written, and it just absorbed you into the story.

But that one part caught your eye?
Mmmhhhmm.

Mmmm.
Well, what did you think of it?

The girl may have been a little unceremonious, but maybe it's fair to expect a little impropriety from an adolescent.
Yeah, but that boy had the right to be mad. It was rude.

Yeah, it was pretty rude. How long have you been reading the magazine?
Oh, years and years.

What do you think of it?
I like it.

Do you think it has changed?
Do I think it has changed... yeah! I guess it has, through the years. I barely remember how it used to be.

When I interned at Stuff, it was common practice for interns to write a large portion of the letters to the editor. We rarely had enough letters from people who weren't fucking insane prison inmates to fill the space, so somebody had to do it. This was the case at another mag I worked at, as well (not going to name names on that one though). I always assumed fake letters to the editor were commonplace. And apparently I was right.

I spent a couple of years editing the letters column of a major magazine, and let me tell you...it wasn't easy filling the space with pity and cogent missives. Let's face it: people are idiots.

I was in San Francisco in the summer of 2003, minding my own business. Only I hadn't told my old flame I was on break from from New York, because I wanted to avoid falling into the habit of sleeping with him again. He was on a plane returning to SF from Italy when he thumbed through the current issue of Blender, where my friend was an editor at the time. When his plane landed, he emailed me, "why does Blender think you are in San Francisco?" I made a panicked call to my friend at Blender. She said, oh, I had to make up a bunch of letters to the editor, and I signed your name + San Francisco to one of them." I ran out to get a copy of Blender. The question in my ersatz letter to the editor was something like "is there any truth to the rumors about an orgy with Margaret Trudeau and the Rolling Stones?" To dodge admitting that I was in fact in San Francisco, I replied to old flame's query with "I think the real question is, why does Blender think I don't know the nitty gritty about all the Stones' purported orgies? And the answer is: makes all that shit up." He totally accepted that answer, and didn't find out I was in SF for several more weeks. Most, if not all, of the letters to the editor at Blender were fake the whole time my friend was an editor, but often signed with real names of 's friends, and like, their hometown or someplace they had vacationed recently, so all the letters wouldn't look like they came from New York.

I know this to be the case at 'organic style'...as soon as i read this entry, it rang a bell, someone i know who used to work as a editorial asst there mentioned not just that letters were handed to her, but that they actually wrote them themselves... often.... like every month... so there you go after...after she told me that 2-3 years ago, I made the generalization that this is prob standard.

I used to work at Redbook, and the assistants on staff regularly made up letters and attributed them to friends and family. Later one assistant made the huge mistake of asking her intern to invent a letter. The intern later reported this as one of her internship "duties" to the journalism chair of her school. The professor wrote a letter to the editor condemning this "unethical" practice (dude's obviously never worked at a magazine; they're all hotbeds of unethical practices), and of course the assistant got fired to save face.

The Observer makes them up all the time—I've done it myself. Plus, one editor in particular bars the publication of letters criticizing his pet authors. However, the NYO letters column is so dull, nobody cares. [Ed Note.: One of us used to have an office a few feet from the person who handled the fact-checking of that paper's letters, so uh, grain of salt on this one.]

I used to write the letters describing erotic adventures in Blueboy Magazine. Seriously. $300 per month. Ironically, most of the experiences I wrote about were true. [Note: Some of us had never heard of this publication but were informed that it does, in fact, exist, and is exactly what you think it is. -Ed.]

If you want to see some fantastical fake letters, check out the Ask section on the first page in Parade magazine. If they are real, may god strike me down because I cannot think of a single person who gives a shit about any question I've ever read since I learned to read.

Absolutely never [at Glamour]. There was no need. We received hundreds and hundreds of letters and emails every week. They ran from the dull (e.g. subscription questions to "how do i become a model?"), to the somewhat interesting (e.g. comments on recent features), to the outrageous (e.g. letters from sailors commenting on articles about women's underwear to letters from the Christian right to letters from prisoners and a monthly 12-page critique handwritten on floral stationary from a man in a senior home).

During the time i worked there, Brill's Content ran an article charging that Bonnie Fuller ordered her staff to make up quotes and facts. Without commenting on that, I can tell you that no one ever needed to make up Glamour's letters.

One possible reason why Glamour never had to is because the magazine has a long history of responding to every single letter and email received. It may be that this has nurtured an epistolary relationship with its readers, whereas other magazines are left without much fodder to choose from, but I'm just guessing.

As an editorial assistant for a weekly publication, I can tell you that some people have WAY too much time on their hands. All our letters-to-the-editor are real, but quite a few of them still sound like one of our staff writers penned them as a joke. Some people find very interesting things to be passionate about.

And the ones we don't publish? Those would be the 7-page manuscripts about the writer's specific phobias or conspiracy theories that have nothing whatsoever to do with anything we've ever published.

I'm the letters page editor at a major business magazine. The letters that appear on the page are indeed real and are never embellished with humor or entertaining anecdotes. We once had a letter from a Scotsman chastising us for spelling whisky improperly (only Americans add the 'e') - great letter, and a real one.

Not enough of our readers write to us - does anyone read anymore??? It can be a stretch to get enough usable letters on the page. It is occasoinally tempting to make 'em up, but that temptation is always curtailed by the fact that a) it would bring this mag into disrepute and b) get me fired and force me to work at WalMart. So gawker readers, please write in to the magazines you read. It would make certain letters page editors lives much easier! :-)

Earlier: Does 'Interview' Invent Its Letters To The Editor?

As a former editorial assistant at Interview, I can tell you with 100% accuracy that many of the letters to the editor are made up. I obviously can't vouch for today's example and the previous one, but it was my and the other assistant's responsibility to "factcheck" the letters page, and Brad Goldfarb (then Managing Editor, now Executive Editor), would frequently hand us ostensible letters to the editor that had no source material or contact info.

Earlier: Letters to 'Interview': "Huge Fan of John Mayer"
Letters to 'Interview': I Hate My Generation

Earlier: Letters to 'Interview': I Hate My Generation