Virgil

William Safire, RIP

Well, another person I revered has passed away, the conservative columnist and word maven, William Safire. Safire was never exactly my type of conservative. He certainly was wishy-washy on social issues, but certainly very strong on economic and foreign policy issues. He was actually Richard Nixon’s speechwriter and had authored a few classic speeches. He obviously had a way with words, having come up with phrases “nattering nabobs of negativism” to label the press and calling Hillary Clinton a “congenital liar.” I always enjoyed reading his columns because you were reading one of the finest prose stylists around; whether you agreed with him or not, one analyzed his diction, his phrasing, his sentence structure, his paragraph structure, and the entire shape of the essay. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978. I was shocked to find out this morning that he had never graduated college.

While it was a pleasure to read Safire’s political column during the middle of the week in the New York Times, it was his Sunday column “On Language” that was a never miss. It was a weekly on various elements of the English language, it’s use, and abuse, it’s straining for effect, it’s twists and turns. I have stopped reading the New York Times now for almost ten years, and though Safire had retired for political punditry I had not realized he had not retired from his language column. And what a treat to have discovered it on the internet just now: http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/fea...age/index.html. Though he did not contribute weekly as he had in the past in recent weeks (I suppose because of his illness), his wit and curious observation of words would be on display every so often. His last column was dated this past September 11th on the subject of a relatively new phrase “bending the curve.” Here’s a section of his brilliant prose analyzing this interesting phrase:

Why has curve-bending become such a popular sport? Because the language is in the grip of graphs. The graphic arts are on the march as “showing” tramples on “explaining,” and now we are afflicted with the symbols of symbols. As an old Chinese philosopher never said, “Words about graphs are worth a thousand pictures.”

The first straight-line challenge to the muscular line-benders I could find was in the 1960s, when the power curve was first explained to me by a pilot. “Being behind or ‘on the backside of the power curve’ is an aviation expression,” rooted in World War I, he maintained. “It’s a condition when flying slow takes more energy than going fast, and you produce a result opposite to what you intended.” On the graph of the power that a plane needs to overcome wind resistance, most “drag” increases as a plane slows; that’s why you hear a fresh surge of power when a jet is landing. Pilots know that being “behind the power curve” is to be on the way to a crash. That image was snapped up in political lingo, when “to be behind that power curve” quickly came to mean “to be out of the loop, trailing the with-it crowd, doomed to be left behind the barn door when the goodies were being handed out.”

Now we have President Obama, no slouch at seizing on popular figures of speech, warning Fred Hiatt of The Washington Post that “it’s important for us to bend the cost curve, separate and apart from coverage issues, just because the system we have right now is unsustainable and hugely inefficient and uncompetitive.” In other words, as the bygone aviators knew — bend it or crash. That led to the Nation’s headline “Bend It Like Obama,” a play on the movie title “Bend It Like Beckham.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/ma...anguage-t.html.

Here’s that humor on display (he had what I would call a wonderful Jewish wit) in the opening on a column on vogue words:

You walk into a PetSmart, a supermarket for dog and cat supplies that allows customers to shop along with their animal companions. You hear a voice on a loudspeaker say urgently, “Would an associate report to the rubber-toys aisle.” Instantly, a guy with a mop and pail appears, zeros in on the puddle behind a shamefaced puppy and takes care of the problem.

The job title of the person doing the mopping-up is associate. No longer is today’s man with a muck rake termed an employee; that description is deemed demeaning. Associate hints at managerial equality.

Of course, employee is higher in the pecking order than worker. Although “hard worker” remains a compliment, few today prefer plain worker as a job description — whatever the color of the collar — though it’s less pejorative than Shakespeare’s underlings and surely better than “unemployed.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/ma...anguage-t.html

And one more, this one on the phrases an “aha and senior moments:”

“We’ve all had our ‘aha’ moments,” reports the science writer Robert Lee Hotz in a recent article on “the payoff of daydreaming” in The Wall Street Journal. He cites the psychologist John Kounios for a definition: “An ‘aha’ moment is any sudden comprehension that allows you to see something in a different light. It could be a solution to a problem; it could be getting a joke or suddenly recognizing a face. It could be realizing that a friend of yours is not really a friend.”

A Washington Post interview a couple of weeks ago with Lynn Salvo, who teaches mathematics to children in the nonthreatening environment of summer camps, quoted her saying: “I love watching them — that’s why I do it. It’s just so exciting to see kids’ expressions when they get it, to see that look on their faces — the aha moment.”

The central element of the phrase now in vogue — aha!, long a favorite of palindromists — was first recorded by Chaucer, in his “Canterbury Tales” (1380s onward), who had hunters cry: “A ha the fox! And after him they ran.”

And in the same column he complements “aha moment” with it’s complement, “senior moment:”

Senior moment is growing riper as the population ages, especially in its association as precursor to the aha! moment.

In the current edition of The Brain in the News at www.dana.org, where I work, Guy McKhann, a doctor and a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, writes in his column: “We all have experienced the phenomenon known as a senior moment, and it occurs more frequently as we get older. We can’t come up with a name. We know all about the person . . . but no name. Frantically we try to come up with a first letter — and are usually wrong. In despair, we turn our attention to something else. Then, seemingly out of the blue, the name pops up. The prototypical senior moment.”

McKhann, a leader in the new field of neuroeducation, which ties together cognitive science, arts training and learning in the schoolroom, hypothesizes that “the brain is bringing more resources to the problem without any conscious direction from you . . . perhaps the brain adapts by recruiting other pathways to help solve the problem. Now, tell me again what your name is?”

We forget. But after that embarrassing senior moment, perhaps — in “a payoff to daydreaming” — another, happier instant flashes on like one of those cool, compact fluorescent light bulbs: the aha! moment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/ma...anguage-t.html

Mr. Safire was extremely prolific, a writer of several columns per week for many years, four novels, books on politics, of course speeches for politicians, and many top notch books on words and writing. Rest in peace Mr. Safire. You have given me years of enjoyment and insight. I’ll conclude with his obit from the newspaper he was long associated with, The New York Times:

William Safire, Political Columnist and Oracle of Language, Dies at 79

William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times who also wrote novels, books on politics and a Malaprop’s treasury of articles on language, died at a hospice in Rockville, Md., on Sunday. He was 79.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Martin Tolchin, a friend of the family.
There may be many sides in a genteel debate, but in the Safire world of politics and journalism it was simpler: There was his own unambiguous wit and wisdom on one hand and, on the other, the blubber of fools he called “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”

He was a college dropout and proud of it, a public relations go-getter who set up the famous Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate” in Moscow, and a White House wordsmith in the tumultuous era of war in Vietnam, Nixon’s visit to China and the gathering storm of the Watergate scandal, which drove the president from office.

Then, from 1973 to 2005, Mr. Safire wrote his twice-weekly “Essay” for the Op-Ed page of The Times, a forceful conservative voice in the liberal chorus. Unlike most Washington columnists who offer judgments with Olympian detachment, Mr. Safire was a pugnacious contrarian who did much of his own reporting, called people liars in print and laced his opinions with outrageous wordplay.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/us/28safire.html?hp

Pugnacious, witty, and charming. A nice way to be remembered.