"Passive Voice" in the New Yorker

[Baker, John]

        Mark Liberman recently wrote in Language Log,
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1227, that, for everyone except
linguists and a few exceptionally old-fashioned intellectuals, what
"passive voice" now means is "construction that is vague as to agency".
Disturbingly, a short piece by Nancy Franklin in the March 23, 2009,
issue of The New Yorker,
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/03/23/090323ta_talk_franklin, seems
to bear that out.  It is a discussion of Bernard Madoff's allocution,
his formal court statement acknowledging guilt:

        <<Two sentences later, Madoff said, "When I began the Ponzi
scheme, I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate
myself and my clients from the scheme." As he read this, he betrayed no
sense of how absurd it was to use the passive voice in regard to his
scheme, as if it were a spell of bad weather that had descended on him.
Still, he had faith-he "believed"!-that it would soon be over. Yes,
"soon." In most of the rest of the statement, one not only heard the
aggrieved passive voice but felt the hand of a lawyer:  "To the best of
my recollection, my fraud began in the early nineteen-nineties.">>

        If there is an example of the passive voice in Madoff's quoted
statements, it has escaped my attention.  Unlike the blog Liberman
cites, The New Yorker reportedly has professionally edited text.


John Baker

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