William Safire, columnist,verbal bersagliere, polemicist,speech writer, linguistic litigant died Sunday at age 79.
He was a speechwriter in the Nixon White House. he wrote Vice President Spiro Agnew's famous phrase, "nattering nabobs of negativism."
I used to buy the Sunday NT Times just to read his article.
Safire spent more than 30 years writing on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. In his "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine and more than a dozen books, Safire traced the origins of words and everyday phrases such as "straw man," "under the bus" and "the proof is in the pudding." He was a master in the use of our common language, and an expert on the uncommon language.
May he rest in peace.
