Style vs. substance

The New Yorker has an interesting piece on what it takes to change house style at the New York Times.

Among the many peculiarities of Times house style—such as the tradition, in the Book Review, that the word “odyssey” refer only to a journey that begins and ends in the same place—one of the more nettlesome has been the long-standing practice that writers are not supposed to call the Armenian genocide of 1915 a genocide.

Any of you who have worked on a stylebook committee (or who worked at a paper with some stilted style rules) should appreciate this.