“I think we all have a need to know what we do not need to know.” – William Safire.
Bill Safire died. The New York Times reports that he succumbed to pancreatic cancer today.
Safire is one of my literary heroes. As a newspaper columnist, I often looked to him for cues despite the fact that, politically, we didn’t have a whole lot in common. On Language, his weekly column in The Sunday Times, introduced me to the amateur etymologist, self-professed pundit and pulp linguist.
He will be missed.
Safire was the newspaperman’s grammarian. A former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, he caused a controversy when he joined the Times’ staff in 1973 as a columnist. He was expected to be a shill for the American right. By ’79, he won a Pulitzer for his columns, which often included his own dogged reporting. A conservative, certainly, but Safire was a damned good journalist.
The eponymous book that collected his “On Language” columns – which like most of my favorite books in my formative years was discovered, covered in dust, on my father’s book shelf in the garage – was my unofficial style guide, second only to the AP Stylebook. If the AP Stylebook is the “journalist’s bible,” then “On Language” is the columnist’s bible.
I’m looking through the book “On language” as I write. Safire is valuable to me as a writer because he eschewed clutter but not character. His prose was lean, but it was funny. Despite his background as a speechwriter – or maybe because of it – he could deflate political doublespeak and dissect buzzwords in a way that was so engaging you never forgot the language lesson that rest beneath his criticism.
He even annotated his own book jacket. Here’s an excerpt of the About the Author section of “On Language”:
William Safire of The New York Times is the most widely read writer on language in America today. The new national word-watcher is catching our words on the wing in their regional migrations, their flights of fancy, and their nose-dives into pomposity and pretension. (Note from W.S.: This metaphor has tired wings. “Nose dive,” as a noun, should be two words, and only takes the hyphen when used as a verb.
He’s probably best known for his “fumblerules” of writing, which are taught in English classrooms the world over, often without attribution. I break many of them on a regular basis, but I don’t think Bill would mind, given that I know many of them by heart. Among them, Safire advises to “Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.” He chides the amateur writer, “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.”"Also,” he warns, “avoid awkward or affected alliteration.”
Let’s hope, for his sake, they have Merriam-Webster’s in the afterlife.
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