Excerpts from Jessica Helfand, "Review of Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age." I.D., 44:2 (March/April 1997) 95.


Boasting a literary sensibility both 'cosmopolitan and streetwise,' and arguing for a blend of 'the technical with the typical,' the book offers detailed glossaries of geek-speak which succeed when they remain clear and objective--qualities indeed recommendable for a book of reference. This much is good: readers can see whether to alphabetize acronymns (it depends); or to hyphenate such colloquialisms as screenshot (don't); neo-luddite (do); and Russian-blood-and-Russian-soil-Green-back-to-nature mystic ideology (a combination thereof ...or perhaps an example of 'going for the gonzo.')

Hyphenation is another topic on which Wired's editors claim to be experts: "It just seems like hyphens ultimately vanish," observes the revrerent Louis Rosetto, Wired's notorious pater familias. 'It's the way of the world. Electronic mail became e-mail became email.' Were the editors of Wired Style to have had the humility to do any proper research, they might have come across a simpler definition of colloquial hyphenation in Strunk and White's The Elements of Style: 'Do not use a hyphen between two words that can better be written as one word,' suggests E.B. White in the 1979 edition of the 1935 classic. 'After a period of hyphenation,' he explains, 'two words eventually become one.'

But in the Wired mind, there is no 'period' of anything. Keeping their'eyes trained on the future,'has apparently been achieved at the expense of any fair appraisal of historical accomplishment. In this view, Wired will continue to exist in the proprietary vacuum it has so expertly created, denouncing history, denying classicism, and rewriting the rules as it zips along, at breakneck speed, into the new millenium. In this artificial paradise, perhaps, it can finally lay claim to the authority it so desperately seeks."

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