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I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

When readers who care about grammar and style write letters to the New Yorker magazine, there's one thing that they complain

about more than anything else can you guess what it is? Harvard comma

Oxford comma the two dots over the O yes yes the yes, the diarices. Diaris, yes. Fancy. It's a diacritical mark that's over the

vowel, the second of two vowels that are bumping up against each other so in words like reelect or reenact or dias or cooperate

so you don't mistake them for cooporate or something like that I mean who needs that right? Well kind of the clue is there if you want it.

Right, but I'm one of the complainers. I mean I haven't written to them but I would write to them and we know that it's the most common complaint because of a wonderful new book called

between you and me Confessions of a Comic Queen and this is by Mary Norris the longtime copy editor at the New Yorker, and she explains why they're still

using it.

Oh, to tell.

Well, she says that her predecessor had a conversation with the style editor at the magazine and said you know we really

should get rid of this it looks kind of fussy nobody else uses it and so they had

a conversation about it and the style editor said you know I'm on the verge of changing that

rule and I'm going to send out a memo soon but he died before he could send out

the memo so they just kept doing it yes Yes, and Mary Norris writes,

this was in 1978.

No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since.

Because if you try to remove the diaruses you're going to die.

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