"Passive Voice" in the New Yorker

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 03:17:26PM -0400, Baker, John wrote:
>         My criticism is of The New Yorker, not of Liberman.  My example
> from The New Yorker is supportive of his point.

My misunderstanding; I thought that Liberman had been the one
quoting The New Yorker in LL, and you were disagreeing with
something he said. I see now that you were adding to his point
with something that he had not quoted. (And I did read the
original LL post.)

My apologies.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

> -----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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org