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William Safire died today. He was 79.
Most grown-ups, defined here as the people who lived through Vietnam and the Nixon administration, will probably remember Safire as Nixon’s speechwriter, and later one of the few conservative voices to regularly write for the New York Times editorial page.
But I was too young for any of that. I met Safire in the pages of the New York Times Sunday magazine, in his column, “On Language.”
My parents loved “On Language,” so naturally I hated the column when I was first introduced. I thought he was curmudgeonly, and overly concerned with the obscure minutia of language.
In short, I was a moron.
