Safire's Impact on Language Through Column

Writer Attempted to Provide Context, Understanding for Modern Words

Sep 29, 2009

For 30 years William Safire made a lasting contribution writing on language in the New York Times. He was known as an arbiter of meanings, use, colloquialisms, and slang.

The quirkiness and frequent misuse or misunderstanding of language—whether in newspaper writing, other forums, or in common speech—were frequent topics of William Safire in his longtime New York Times Magazine column, “On Language.” An author, speech writer for both President Richard M. Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, as well as Times columnist, Safire died September 27 in Rockville, Maryland, at age 79 from pancreatic cancer.

Aside from his also widely read political writings in the newspaper, Safire produced the weekly “On Language” commentary from 1979 until two weeks before his death. Robert D. McFadden, in the Times obituary of September 28, 2009, “William Safire, Political Columnist and Oracle of Language, Dies at 79,” wrote: “The columns, many collected in books, made him an unofficial arbiter of usage, and one of the most widely read writers on language. It also tapped into the lighter side of the dour-looking Mr. Safire: a Pickwickian quibbler who gleefully pounced on gaffes, inexactitudes, neologisms, misnomers, solecisms and perversely peccant puns, like ‘the president’s populism’ and ‘the first lady’s momulism,’ written during the Carter presidency.”

Safire did not have “the cloddish metaphors, arch constructions, one-sentence paragraphs and dreary wonkery that are the stock in trade of too many modern American columnists,” Michael Elliott said in a September 28, 2009 Time Magazine appreciation, “William Safire: Pundit, Provocateur, Penman.”

“On Language” Column Covered Trends in Language and Origins of Words

In “On Language,” he wrote about trends in language as well as origins of certain words and their various definitions. One such example was “channeling,” in one of his last columns which bore that very title on September 3, 2009.

There he took Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent words: “I am not going to be channeling my husband,” in her indignant reply to being asked for former President Bill Clinton’s opinion, and noted that the term’s meaning extended from conveying what someone else thinks to not being able to speak or think for one’s self.

Safire also liked to examine slang, the cultural allusion made with some words, why attention to the point of obsession sometimes was paid to certain uses of grammar, and the reaction to departures from conventional use of language. He also wrote about knowing when to use a plural verb, split infinitive (“Remember to never split an infinitive.”), or preposition, and to avoid inconsistent tense structure (Wrong: “I wanted to be a ballet dancer, but I prefer politics.” Correct: “I wanted to be a ballet dancer” (past tense), “but I preferred politics” (also past tense)).

Safire Noted Conflicting and Unclear Definitions Often Given Words Used by the Press

In a column this past summer, he examined the conflicting, unclear, and temporarily convenient definitions given to words the press often uses, such as reconciliation, anomalies, and expediency.

In addition, Safire cited confusion over word meaning: using the adjective “fulsome” to indicate “complete,” “abundant” or “copious, when some consider the definition to be “satiating, cloying, excessive”; using the noun “plethora” to mean “plenty” when others may take it as “too much”; “tranche,” with its origins as a French word meaning to “slice” or “cut into portions,” now transferred to congressional lexicon in the context of the budget stimulus to refer to installments of bailouts or repayments of debt; or using “investing” in place of “spending.” But Safire could write too about what’s behind taboo slang terms like “orgasmic,” and “screw.” (“Although to screw around still suggests promiscuity, the substitution of up for around obliterates any sexual connotation.”)

Examining Use of Passive Voice and New Meanings for Expressions

Safire described use of the passive voice (“mistakes were made’) as a means to avoid direct responsibility for some action and to draw less attention to a speaker. In addition, he noted a new meaning for the expression “teachable moment,” following the fallout over President Obama criticizing the Cambridge, Massachusetts police at a news conference for the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates: “we can now add ‘when a national leader espousing health legislation admits going ‘off message’.’”

Safire called those offered their own input on his language subjects “Lexicographic Irregulars.” He referred to them in a June 2009 column in which he looked at common phrases and sayings and how possibly to indicate their purported or estimated source.

In what would be his final column, on September 11, 2009, “Bending the Curve,” Safire discussed how the expressions “power curve,” with its origin as an aviation term, and “behind the curve,” had come to designate peril ahead or being excluded in some way regarding the ongoing U.S. health care debate. He wrote: “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’.”

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