Eleanor Gould Packard, the grammarian for the New Yorker magazine for 54 years whose search for logic, clarity and correct usage in sentences won her grateful as well as grudging admirers among the staff, has died. She was 87. [.....]There's an appreciation here (via A&L Daily):"The important thing is to love having things right, from the proper use of commas to the search for perfect clarity," she said in a 1999 interview...
[A]ccording to his biographer Harrison Kinney, Thurber wrote that "facetiously" was the only word in English that had all six vowels in order. What about "abstemiously"? the copy editor replied. Thurber, who was not easily impressed, was finally compelled to ask, "Who is Eleanor Gould?" [.....]Miss Gould once found what she believed were four grammatical errors in a three-word sentence.