"Passive Voice" in the New Yorker

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 02:57:02PM -0400, Baker, John wrote:
>         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.

I'm not sure I understand your criticism here. The quotation
is from The New Yorker (here quoted from its online version),
not from a blog. And Madoff _did not_ use the passive voice,
but TNY is saying (twice) that he did. That's Liberman's
point.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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