In  its 84^th year, Time magazine has just given itself a face-lift, with a new look and revamped content. Along the way, the editors announced that they'll be getting rid of the last vestiges of the involuted syntax that used to be a stylistic signature of the mag: "Died. Charles ("Pretty Boy") Floyd, desperado, of gunshot wounds, near East Liverpool, Ohio."

Actually, it has been a long time since inverted sentences like that were prominent in Time outside of its "Milestones" section. If people remember that particular tic today, it's mostly via a famous line from a parody of Time that Wolcott Gibbs wrote in 1936: "Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind." But there was a lot more to Time-style than that, back when the magazine was transforming journalism with a new and compelling tone of voice.

The style was originally the creation of Briton Hadden, who co-founded Time with Henry Luce in 1923. The two were right out of Yale, and the magazine's language was laced with the airs and affectations of a bright undergraduate. The vocabulary was a showy mix of the exotic, the folksy, and the contrived -- anything that might suggest an arch detachment from the subject. Time popularized esoteric foreign words like the Hindi pundit and turned the Japanese-derived tycoon into a familiar word for a magnate. It adapted the Greek word kudos as a synonym for "praise" (originally the word meant simply glory). It revived archaic and dialect words like hustings, hornswoggle, passel, and scrivener. And it contributed a long list of breezy coinings to the language, from early items like pinko, newshawk, socialite, pollster, and racketeer to later terms like Disneyfication, eco-freak, and televangelist.

In Time-style, people never walked -- they sauntered, strode, shambled, ambled, or slouched. And they made their entries preceded by a retinue of Homeric epithets, sometimes lined up two or three deep -- "gaunt, scraggle-haired President Eamon de Valera," "burly but suave Benito Mussolini," "sloe-eyed, soft-spoken Generalissimo Francisco Franco." Tall, lanky men were invariably Lincolnesque -- at one time or another the adjective was applied to Henry Wallace, Raymond Massey, Henry Fonda, Omar Bradley, Arthur Miller, Gregory Peck, and Anthony Perkins. And the writers ransacked the thesaurus for descriptions of Hermann Göring's girth -- over the course of the 1930's his name was prefixed by bull-necked, beefy, big-boned, obese, stanch-belllied, and porcine.

That language was aimed at turning the people Time wrote about into the stock characters of miniature B-movie melodramas, each with its setup, angle, twist, and final kicker. The template rarely varied. People often repeat the Count de Buffon's remark that "the style is the man," but at Time, the style was the mag. It could boast a brilliant stable of writers -- its early alumni included Steven Vincent Benet, James Agee, John O'Hara, and Archibald MacLeish. But they had to submit to an editorial process that extirpated any trace of individuality. To Time's critics, that process stood in for the magazine's pernicious influence on journalism in general. In 1957, Garry Wills wrote that Time's mass-produced style was creating a kind of Newspeak, by collectivizing language and thought. And Marshall McLuhan described Time's style as a language in which nobody could tell the truth.

Those concerns seem remote now. For one thing, Time's journalism is much better now, and its politics have softened since the days when liberal Democrats wouldn't let the magazine cross their doorstep. In any case, Time doesn't have the political or cultural importance it did in its early decades -- now it's just another publication fighting for its life as its paper shrivels up from under it. And the magazine has long since abandoned the flash and brummagem of its early style, along with its impersonality. Time has been giving its writers credit for 40 years now, and the first-person pronoun is no longer a stranger to its pages. When we run across a bit of clever wordplay now, we know who to thank for it. In a recent review, Richard Corliss described the display of buff male bodies in 300 as "Homer eroticism." It's a bit that would have done credit to Time in its heyday, but it reads better with a byline under it than it would have as the product of an anonymous style-machine.

But much of Time-style hasn't so much disappeared as it has been absorbed into the zero-degree communal language of modern journalism. I'm not thinking just of the descriptive ledes that set the scene -- "As a thin rain fell on Washington last week…" -- or the punning headers.[1] More important, Time shaped the pervasive tone of modern journalism -- knowing, distanced, superior, and a little cynical.

In the old days, critics sometimes professed to see an inconsistency between the cockiness and irreverence of Time's style and its editorial deference to success and power -- one writer described the style as embodying an ethical schizophrenia. But that got it dead wrong. As Time used them, archness and irony were devices for accommodating and diminishing the more unpleasant realities of the world. Edmund Wilson once said that Time's style reduced human beings to mannikins -- it gave the impression that "all the pursuits, past and present, of the human race are rather an absurd little scandal about which you might find out some even nastier details if you met the editors of Time over cocktails." I don't know that Wilson would be that hard on Time itself today. But you can't help wondering what he would have had to say about cable news.

1. A 1934 story about the frantic efforts to finish the Moscow subway on schedule for the Soviet five-year plan was called "Planic Rush," and one about a low turnout in a vote among farmers on corn-hog subsidies was called "Half Hog" -- the sorts of headers that are routine these days in publications from Barron's to the New Republic.