This week, the top copy editor of The New Yorker announced that the magazine had completed a “reëxamination” of its house style.
A few things were changing. But its dedication to the dieresis — those two little dots that float above certain vowels, beloved by New Yorker editors and almost nobody else — was not.
“For every person who hates the dieresis and feels like it’s precious and pretentious and ridiculous, there’s another person who finds it charming,” Andrew Boynton, the head of the copy department at the magazine, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.
The magazine, which doesn’t look a day over 100, is famous for its attachment to heterodox spelling and punctuation rules. So Mr. Boynton’s decision to announce changes to the style guide in The New Yorker’s daily newsletter on Monday was noteworthy. The revolution arrived in two squat paragraphs containing two diereses, three em dashes and four pairs of parentheses.
The magazine will abandon “Web site,” “in-box,” and “Internet” in favor of the more familiar “website,” “inbox” and “internet.” “Cellphone” will be one word, rather than two.
“Welcome to 1995, you may be thinking,” Mr. Boynton wrote in the announcement, providing an example of another new rule: Thoughts will be italicized in an effort to differentiate them from other text.
The keepers of the magazine’s house style have been purposely slow to make concessions to the internet age. “We don’t want to make a change and then change it back,” he said. “We want to make sure it’s a lasting change that is elsewhere in the world and that people are familiar with and comfortable with.”
Potential changes were crowdsourced from a group of current and former editors and copy editors in January at the suggestion of David Remnick, the magazine’s longtime editor. Mr. Boynton and a colleague came up with a list of proposals in February.
He was tight-lipped about which ones had been rejected. “I don’t want them to become, you know, objects of fetishization in the outside world,” he said.
The New Yorker’s style rules provoke strong reactions in the mostly civil realm of grammarians. In opinion pieces and on social media, critics have long accused the magazine of snobbery, inelegance and overzealous use of commas.
They take issue with its doubled consonants in “traveller” and “focussed.” They obsess over its diacritic flourish on “reëlection.” Mr. Boynton once felt the need to mount a defense of the way the magazine punctuates the possessive form of “Donald Trump Jr.” (It requires three punctuation marks in a row.)
Benjamin Dreyer, the retired copy chief of Random House and the author of “Dreyer’s English,” has his quibbles with the magazine’s house style. (For one, he called the Donald Trump Jr. punctuation rule “unspeakably hideous.”) But he praised the most recent round of updates in a phone call on Wednesday.
“I’ve been making a joke for years that you shouldn’t necessarily have a house style that is visible from outer space,” he said. “But that’s what The New Yorker is about: They want to be The New Yorker.”
He said he was relieved the magazine had not done away with diereses. He was happy its editors had stood by its outlier constructions of “teen-ager” and “per cent.” But other updates were long overdue.
“Finally shrinking ‘website’ to a lowercase, single word — I think we did that at Random House, I don’t know, two decades ago?” he said.
The magazine’s writers and editors have so far seemed pleased with the changes, Mr. Boynton said. Plus, he knows they will break whatever rules they cannot stand.
Sometimes he lets them. “That’s something that I think a lot of people don’t understand about The New Yorker,” he said. “For as many rules as we have, we’re making exceptions all the time.”
