Remembering Safire

Whatever you think of his politics, William Safire will be remembered as a fine writer with a respect for ideas.

It may seem odd that I had affection for a columnist who wrote speeches for Richard Nixon and that consummate boob Spiro T. Agnew, but I liked William Safire in spite of his political affiliations.

Safire's politics were quirky, to put it mildly. A self-described "libertarian conservative," he voted for Bill Clinton, and then called Hillary a “congenital liar.” He defended George W.'s Iraqi adventure, WMDs and all, even subscribing to one of the wilder conspiracy theories on the Right: an alleged al-Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection. Despite being debunked by the 9/11 Commission, Safire's tale of a Prague meeting between 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta and senior Iraqi officials was never retracted: he called the meeting an "undisputed fact."

But for me his politics were secondary. It was his love of language that I treasured. It somehow took me this long to discover from the obituaries that he, and not Agnew, coined the phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism" to describe the media pundits of his era. When I subscribed to the Sunday New York Times, the first thing I turned to was his "On Language" column in NYT Magazine. It was always a fun read – no stern, if slyly witty, Henry W. Fowler was he. An incurable lover of puns, he was also one who eschewed an overly prescriptive view, though he held to his standards:

Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don't overuse exclamation marks!!

He was always current and his research was meticulous – although not perfect. His column on "Blegging for blargon in the blogosphere" is well worth a read for those of us in the game. In it, he credits William Quick of the Daily Pundit for coining the latter term on January 1, 2002. In fact, "blogosphere" made its first appearance on September 10, 1999 in an on-line column by Brad Graham, a piece also worth reading to remind us how recent is our time-devouring addiction.

Safire didn't see eye-to-eye with those of us who push for a gender-free lexical shift: those feminists who want to use "actor" to refer to an actress, he said, would never call Madonna a "sex god." But he responded with good grace when avid readers pointed out his own inevitable linguistic errors.

There's a personal connection here, too. Many years ago, responding to a column of his on abortion-issue terminology, I had the temerity to write to him and make the case for using "pro-choice" instead of "pro-abortion." (Were no-fault divorce law supporters "pro-divorce?" I recall asking.) I never did receive a response, but one day a colleague asked me if I'd seen Safire's new book, darned if I can remember which it was – there were so many. He had reproduced the letter in its entirety, devoting a page to it, right after a reprint of his column, all without comment. To this day I believe that Safire was interested in the exploration of ideas above all else, without needing to draw hard and fast conclusions, and that the honour he did me was in that spirit.

Indeed Safire should be remembered, not only as a man passionate about language, but as a civil and urbane conservative who, I would like to believe, was as appalled by the current outbreak of right-wing political ergotism as am I. He died of pancreatic cancer, an illness I know well. A lousy way to go for a man who, whatever his politics, touched people across the political divide.