Several of the past week's tributes to language columnist andpundit William Safire, who died last Sunday, referred to him as alanguage arbiter. John McWhorter, in Forbes magazine, noted that heand his fellow linguists "were not Safire fans. His take on languagewas that it is something to be policed rather than observed."
A lot of loyal readers also assumed that policing was Safire'srole, which is why he had a fat folder of mail - labeled "You ofAll People!" - itemizing his own mistakes. But was Safire really aprescriptivist, an enforcer of rules, a resister of language change?Or was that just one of the minor roles he played in his long-running "On Language" gig?
It's only natural that early readers of the column, which startedin February 1979, would have expected the Times's grammar guy tochampion traditional usage rules. Safire's immediate predecessor inlanguage mavenry, NBC newsman Edwin Newman, took his arbiter roleseriously (though, like Safire, he was a joker and an unrepentantpunster). His 1974 book "Strictly Speaking," the first of two best-selling language rants, was subtitled "Will America be the Death ofEnglish?"
Newman was not kidding; the language was in decline, he said, andone reason was the erosion of authority in the wake of Vietnam,which "made age and experience and position look ridiculous."Watergate shared the blame, revealing abuse not just of theConstitution but also of the language: Nixon "kicking butts" ontape, John Mitchell saying "grievious," the whole nation infectedwith "at that point in time." (For Newman, Safire - till 1973 apresidential speechwriter - was part of the problem: The languageis in trouble, Newman wrote, when the vice president wins fame bycalling the press "nattering nabobs of negativism.")
Safire was willing to play the language judge now and then -with the emphasis on "play." But as he promised in his very firstcolumn, he was more interested in tracking vogue words, etymologies,and political speech than in denouncing fads and scourging sinners.When asked for a verdict, he might come down on the side oftraditional usage or not: He defended hopefully from the beginning,and though he admired the sticklers who wanted to keep anxious andeager from mingling, he declined to join their campaign.
His interests, and his approach, didn't change much over thedecades; the puns and the politics are there from the first columnto the last. But during those 30 years, the language researchlandscape was changing dramatically.
When Safire launched his column, the Web was barely a gleam inTim Berners-Lee's eye; there were no Internet resources, nonewspaper databases, no simple way to check your intuitions aboutlanguage. And readers understood this: If Safire wrote that "use ofthe Roman numeral II seems to have doubled," or that " `belittle' isbeing slighted in favor of{hellip}`trivialize,' " or thatbureaucrats were no longer "traveling" but "in travel status," itwas heard as a jokey generalization, not a strictly factual claim.
But once the extent of a language trend could be easily checked,Safire's playful speculations - buttressed, if at all, by cursoryresearch - began to sound irresponsible to some readers, andespecially to scholars. Linguists at the American Dialect Society'slistserv, ADS-L, were regularly driven to teeth-gnashing: We cantell you whether use of the Roman numeral is rising, whethertrivialize is outpacing belittle, they said; you just have to ask.
But if Safire's freewheeling approach - "loosey-goosey," hewould have called it - made him an indifferent scholar, it alsobarred him from the ranks of true prescriptivists. Temperamentally,he lacked the true peevologist's deep conviction that every splitinfinitive and every missed subjunctive was a lurch toward the abyssof meaninglessness.
He would call a foul now and then, of course - presidents fromReagan to Obama got zinged for misuses ("enormity"),mispronunciations ("tie-ranny" for tyranny), and several species ofweasel words. But as a happy hyperbolist and unrepentant innovator,unchecked by serious study of the old shibboleths, Safire was notcut out to be a nattering nabob of language negativism.
Safire's fellow conservative John Podhoretz noticed - anddeplored - the truth. Safire, he wrote a week ago in his blog atCommentary, was "an advocate for inelegant prose at a time whenAmericans really could have used a voice of authority that did notgrant them unlimited permission to muck around with the rules ofgrammar and usage."
To those who think mucking around with language is and always hasbeen a normal human activity, this will not count as a demerit forSafire. And the readers who wanted Safire to be a stern judge,fulminating over his fellow Americans' language crimes, may havebeen able to read him that way. But if language peeves brought theminto Safire's tent, what kept them coming back was not homiliesabout hewing to the old rules. It was Safire's endless enthusiasmfor language innovation that lured his legions of readers and thatsurely, over the decades, persuaded many to relax and enjoy theshow. He may not have preached that doctrine, but he was a master atpracticing it.
E-mail Jan Freeman at mailtheword@gmail.com. For past columns, goto boston.com/ideas.
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