R.I.P., Miss Gould. Verlyn Klinkenborg:

To some people, I suspect, she came to embody the negative image of the copy editor: punctilious, schoolmarmish and blue-stockinged. But the grasp she had on the written word, on the inner springs and impulses of the language, made grammar and syntax and diction resemble the laws of physics. From one angle, those laws mark the limits of nature. From another angle, they define the very energies that shape the universe and make it intelligible.

In a review of 75th-anniversary New Yorker books I wrote five years ago for Newsday, I made an awful error that was compounded by the newspaper’s customary lack of a checking department: I referred to “the late Miss Gould.” Now that the fact is true, that intelligible universe is sadly less so.

Later: In the February 28 issue, Remnick writes his own tribute to the Grammarian. “She shaped the language of the magazine, always striving for a kind of Euclidean clarity—transparent, precise, muscular. It was an ideal that seemed to have not only syntactical but moral dimensions.”
Gould—like Orwell, Fowler, Bernstein, White, and the modest others now marking proofs in offices—knew well that clear language so often indicates a clear conscience, or will once the copy editor is done with it. “That type is all but extinct,” we say of such people, as of a Galapagos turtle. When the real death occurs it is immeasurably sadder.

The Point of Miss Gould’s Pencil [NY Times]
Miss Eleanor Gould ’38, Grammarian Extraordinaire, Holds The Line at The New Yorker [Oberlin alumni magazine]
An Ode to Miss Gould: The Fallibility Rag [Cynthia Ozick, via PBK]