"Passive Voice" in the New Yorker

[Baker, John]

        My criticism is of The New Yorker, not of Liberman.  My example
from The New Yorker is supportive of his point.


John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Jesse Sheidlower
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2009 3:08 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Passive Voice" in the New Yorker

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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