I have been reading the columns of William Safire since his death. Although I read the New York Times every day, I have not read the Sunday Magazine very often, thus missing Safire's columns.
I've noted many of his mannerism, moves and techniques of writing. Perhaps I will try some of them out myself, in future columns, and maybe it's good that I have not been reading him too closely as I developed my own style.
William Safire's death and the retirement of James Kilpatrick have reminded me how many language mavens seem to be drawn to conservative politics. Safire was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, famous for the term "nattering nabobs of negativism" he put into the mouth of the otherwise unremarkable Vice President Spiro Agnew. Kilpatrick used to be a regular in the back-and-forth liberal-versus-conservative slot that the show "60 Minutes" gave them 30 years ago. Needless to say, he was the conservative.
What is it about the mavens, then, that disposes many of them toward political conservatism? I think there are two answers, and they are summed up in two words that have earned undeserved bad reputations \— discrimination and elitism. Simply put, language mavens, people who have opinions on good and bad usage, are both discriminating and elitist.
"Discrimination" is usually seen as something to be abhorred. It is true that many kinds of discrimination are bad, wrong and even illegal, but not all discrimination is such. To discriminate means to discern differences and to make judgments. A discriminating movie reviewer can tell the difference between creativity and imitation, the flat and the fabulous. Likewise, a discriminating maven makes fine distinctions between living and dead metaphors, between affectation and authenticity.
We live in a time when "elitism" is something denounced all along the political spectrum. Left-wing academics and right-wing populists both fulminate against "elites." But lovers of language do not go for the vulgar and the common, for the everyman approach to expression. "Vulgar" originally meant "of the common people." Mavens cherish the best uses of language, often models of clarity from the past. A language lover is not as concerned with what average people say and write, but with how the best speakers and writers use language.
It used to be that conservatives were elitist and discriminating too, certainly men of Safire and Kilpatrick's generation were. That things are different now, that candidates for governor of Texas take pride in dropping the "g" at the ends of words, or misuse "good" and "well," is a development that I doubt either Safire or Kilpatrick would have countenanced.
One last thing that disposes language mavens toward conservatism is that they actively tend and nurture our cultural heritage and are more conscious of doing so than many other people, including other writers. One can write novels, essays, poems, news articles, all sorts of things without a great concern for the past. But mavens hear echoes and overtones to words, etymologies and adaptations, and they know how our language and our literature have evolved over centuries. People who have this kind of reverence for the past are often the same people who believe social change must be limited or resisted, in the name of what is good in our heritage. In other words, conservatives.
But I am not they. I would rather call myself a conservationist. We are inheritors of a centuries-long conversation in which the dead speak to the living, and we write for our contemporaries and for our descendents. And we write, one would hope, as well as possible.
Frank Thomas Pool is a poet and English teacher working in Austin. He grew up on Maple Street in South Longview and graduated from Longview High School. E-mail: FrankT.Pool@gmail.com.
