RIP William Safire

Same here. My teachers used to tell me that his "On Language" columns were the work of a crank, but if so, he was an entertaining crank. Here's a column pretty much at random.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/magazine/22wwln_safire.html

These thoughts are triggered by the copy desk's (two words) objection to the spelling of a word in last week's column, which dealt with irregardless as a jocular redundancy and therefore, in my judgment, "arrant nonsense." Last year, I chose that very phrase as an example of "wedded words," like unmitigated gall, congenital liar and blithering idiot. (The lexical supermaven Sol Steinmetz has since noted that such words joined in wedded bliss - and wedded bliss is another - are in the same league as "fixed phrases," like uphill battle, easy pickings, no-win situation.)

As a language columnist, I have a license to use almost any taboo word or misspelling as an object of study, but not as part of my own prose. The objection was not to its being a word-wedding, cliché or fixed phrase, but because the desk held that arrant should be spelled errant. You could look it up, it (the desk) said, in the Dodger and Yankee manager Casey Stengel's classic phrase.

I looked it up, in Webster's New World, and in Merriam-Webster's, and in American Heritage, and cannot fault the desk: there it was in all three of the best sellers: "arrant, adjective, variant of errant." That was the lexicographers' way of saying that although some spelling deviants insisted on arrant with a beginning a, most sensible people agreed with the establishment and spelled errant with an e. The Times's copy desk was going by the book.

As they say in the Pentagon, I nonconcur. (That's how colonels can disagree with generals without having the eagles stripped off their shoulders.) We are not dealing here with one word with one meaning spelled two different ways, one preferred and one variant; in my view, we are dealing with a word whose meaning has split, and the resulting "variation" in spelling signifies the difference in the two meanings.

Start with the Latin root, iterare, "to travel," which spawned "itinerant" and "itinerary"; a knight-errant was one who wandered around, clanking in his armor, occasionally helping distressed damsels. Spelled with an e, errant's meaning remains "aimless, drifting, straying."

Other errants, however, were highwaymen who preyed on travelers; as the word became synonymous with "thief" - in Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote of an "arrant knave" - that spelling with a signified the meaning of "notorious, extreme, consummate, double-dyed," all more intense than "complete." What had been one word with two senses was changed into two distinct words, each with its own meaning signified by its unique spelling.

If you Google errant, you get nearly three million citations, their sense "roving, straying, sometimes from high standards"; arrant gets only one-tenth as many. But if you enter the phrase "arrant nonsense," you get 35,000 to a mere 772 for "errant nonsense." People know the word with the a means "utter, thoroughgoing, complete," usually carrying the connotation of disapproval. Arrant, the former variant, is now out on its own, its meaning independent of the wandering errant. Let the dictionaries catch up with the living language.

 

I loved his "On Language" columns, it was the first thing I read on Sunday mornings.

 

Like I already implied, I'm not a fan of his politics, but the NPR obituary mentioned that, when Safire was a White House speech writer, his boss, Richard Nixon, tapped his phone.

That's a +1, IMO.

 

William Safire Daily Show