What's the Good Word?/Good Advice
Safir, Leonard & Safire, William & Safire, William
WHAT'S THE GOOD WORD? William Safire/Times Books/$15.95 GOOD ADVICE William Safire and Leonard Safir / Times Books / $16.95 Theo Lippman, Jr. I'm not a meteorologist. I'm a weather reporter....
...A reader corrected him and informed him that the singular version of the word had been misspelled with the same single-n error 26 times in an Elizabeth Arden ad...
...He gives the example of "chaise longue...
...Across the Atlantic many Americans pronounced it and spelled it "chaise lounge.'' So many did for so long, that advertisers found they best advertise that way...
...Safire works his beat as if it were the Pentagon or the House of Representatives...
...Don't tell me about them...
...I found only two in other quotation books...
...He writes one column a week about language for the Times (magazine) and its syndicate...
...ignorance, logic, dictionaries, peda-gogs (pedagogues), and usage relate...
...or haven't you noticed...
...Safire hung up on Guralnik and called the director of advertising for Elizabeth Arden, Paulette Dufault...
...Good advice to the Safir(e)s: if there's another edition, identify these quotations...
...But that's another story, too (the same another story, actually...
...Then there is "catalog" for "catalogue...
...But in recent years columns and articles about the language have been appearing everywhere in mass-appeal newspapers and journals...
...What's the Good Word...
...You misspelled a word...
...So does a letter from Jacques Barzun...
...That's the Washington reporter at work, too...
...Safire spelled it "millenia...
...The difference is that Safire admits it...
...He accepted "hopefully" in the hated sense in his last book, and he will accept "ain't" in his next...
...Right...
...That little essay (and it's typical) tells you more about how language really works than half a dozen lectures by the nation's other best-known mass-audience language writer, Edwin Newman—even half a dozen lectures in which Newman is right...
...That's just the way journalism is supposed to work in Washington, where Safire is stationed...
...My reaction at this point should be, so what...
...This book has one serious shortcoming...
...He liked the look of it...
...It means long chair in French...
...What more is there to say...
...He's on the phone to high-level sources...
...The millenia essay is typical of Safire not just in its informative, reporting style...
...Tell me if I need to wear long Johns to Memorial Stadium tomorrow...
...But what I most like about it is another way in which it is typical of his language writing...
...They are out of context and cannot be easily pursued...
...I wouldn't mind knowing the answer, so I read on...
...These are almost all quotations George Will never found in his Bartlett's or Oxford or even his Mencken's New Dictionary of Quotations...
...By the time you've read all this, you've had a painless, actually enjoyable, lesson in how commerce...
...But someone must care...
...This dialogue (dialog) prompted letters pointing out that "catalog" was not the result of ignorant error or commerce, but of deliberate spelling reform by Melvil Dewey of Dewey decimal system fame...
...He also runs a letter from a reader asking if common misspellings become acceptable after awhile...
...What he writes prompts tips and leaks from the ordinary readers who know his column is their best hope of getting their own axes ground, their ideas or knowledge displayed...
...Of course, one point many letter writers make (and letters make up half the book) is that Safire is unconvincing and in fact wrong much of the time...
...Safire is a lefty in this world if nowhere else, a closet permissivist...
...But Safire hooks you...
...William Safire writes two columns a week about politics for the New York Times and its syndicate...
...I found no— repeat no—quotations I could identify as having been written by former speechwriter to the stars, Safire, which shows remarkable self-restraint—or loftiness...
...It is a good idea, and Good Advice is 362 pages of advice that is "good" in the sense that it is mostly positive, ambitious, and confident...
...A typical piece with its reaction and follow-up has to do with the spelling of the word "millennia...
...So does a letter from an editor of the Second Barnhart Dictionary of New English...
...ntify these quotations...
...The quotations are not dated or placed...
...writes editorials for the Baltimore Sun...
...It begins "Dear Bill...
...With personality...
...I would have thought most people were the same way...
...At another point in the book, he runs a letter from Guralnik...
...As a general rule, the people who criticize Safire tend to be the Republicans of the usage electorate, which is also two-party...
...Guralnik says spelling does change and wrong spellings do become acceptable...
...And so on...
...She says the misspelling was deliberate, because it was a trademark "and we liked the look of it...
...Usage experts and language reporters are among the stars of journalism...
...That it so often doesn't work that way is another story...
...The undertaking itself was ambitious...
...Willard Scott...
...All successful weathermen pun...
...I don't care about the weather in Indiana, unless I'm going there, and I'm usually not, nor do I caje why it is going to be freezing in Baltimore tomorrow, only if it is...
...His well-known breezy, let's-have-pun writing style is also there...
...So does a letter from the editor of the words magazine Verbatim...
...The Quinn-Bollinger essay, entitled "language lib," is the best one in the book, and more or less explains why everybody talks about the language but can't do anything about it...
...You can see through it or beneath it or behind it, to the writer at work, to how it is done...
...I did a Gallup-style scientific random sample of 19 quotations...
...In this book, he denies being a left-winger in an essay on usage guerrilla Jim Quinn and permissivist guru Dwight Bollinger, but he exposes himself in a criticism of word snob John Simon...
...Some even have weather columnists...
...Safire reports on a telephone call to David Guralnik, editor of Cleveland's version of Webster's dictionary...
...He gets hundreds of letters in response...
...I care what it means now, when I use it or when I hear or read it...
...Oafire's brother Safir suggested a book of quotations limited to advice...
...They didn't do it the easy way...
...A copywriter did...
...Weathermen and weath-erwomen are among the stars of broadcasting, invited to lead parades and open shopping centers, and even good newspapers are beginning to devote as much as a full page to weather reports...
...It's like low pressure fronts over the Plains...
...I've never understood the popularity of the weather segments of the network and local television news shows...
...I mention this only because I also don't care much why n word means something or how it may have been used somewhere else some other time...
...You've been corrected...
...He gets maybe a half-dozen letters about a column on a good day...
...Safire obviously has developed good sources and good relationships on the language beat...
...Soon even dictionaries as respected (if permissive) as the New England version of Webster's began to list the phrase that way...
...So does a letter from a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago...
...is a collection of those language columns (the second to appear so far) plus some of that snowstorm of letters...
Vol. 16 • March 1983 • No. 3
