In Honor of the Late William Safire

I had been in communication with Mr. Safire on language issues I have raised here.

In his August 5, 2001 column, "On Language", Safire wrote: "Words have connotations. In the disputed territory known as the West Bank, an Israeli village is called a settlement, implying fresh intrusion; a small Palestinian town, even one recently settled, is called a village, implying permanence." And I noted that his use of "disputed" rather than "occupied," or for that matter, "liberated," in another example of the importance of the terminology one uses.

and there was this posting of mine on January 15, 2006:

More on Terminology

No sooner than I finished posting the last bit of my thinking, I find this at William Safire's column:-

In wartime, words are weapons; we have seen how Israelis and Palestinians are highly sensitive to connotations in their conflict. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon preferred to refer to land in dispute west of the Jordan River by biblical names: Judea and Samaria, evoking Hebrew origins; Israeli diplomats long tried "administered territories." Palestinians call it the West Bank and have won that terminological battle.

On another word-war front, the construction within the West Bank to protect Israelis from rocket attacks and penetration by suicide bombers is called "the wall" by Palestinians intending to evoke memories of the cold war's hated Berlin Wall. Israelis counter by calling it "the fence," a less onerous and more familiar description of a line of separation, recalling to Americans the Robert Frost poetic line "Good fences make good neighbors." (In fact, it is both fence and wall, depending on the place.) After perusal of thesauri, the Bush administration adopted the undeniably accurate word barrier, which has been accepted as neutral by much of the news media and stirs no objection by Israel.

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Too bad the NYTimes' own obit didn't mention his forceful defense of Israel in his columns.

And Safire Knows His Words

On the Obama convention speech:-

The pretension of the fake Grecian temple setting clashed with the high-decibel, rock-star format and overwhelmed the history implicit in the event. Ancient Greeks had a word for it: hubris.

More here.

From Safire's Annual Office Pool Quiz

10. The two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli dispute appears when:
(a) a free election or civil strife in the West Bank and Gaza brings a unified, neighborly government to the Palestinians
(b) an Ehud Barak-Benjamin Netanyahu rematch results in a majoritarian, rightist coalition victory
(c) the Jerusalem division issue is resolved by expanding the official city limits to embrace two capitals

...My picks: 10 (all);

Safire's "Headline of the Year"

Headline of the Year

Writers of headlines — their words cabin’d, cribb’d and confined in capturing the gist of an article — on rare occasion break through with an inspiring turn of phrase. My nomination for Headline of the Year appeared early this month above a full-page commentary infused with original reporting by the Pulitzer-winning Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal.

Her subject was a largely downplayed instance of the current campaign to undermine the First Amendment by Justice Department prosecutors and their F.B.I. satraps of entrapment. Having failed for years to find the “mole” inside the F.B.I. who sold out to the Russians, the agent sought to salvage his reputation by running a “sting” operation. The F.B.I. found a Pentagon analyst who had foolishly taken home papers and — by threatening him with prosecution — induced the analyst to type a supposedly classified document about policy toward Iran and fax a “leak” of it to two staff members he knew in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. F.B.I. agents then wired him for sound and further drew the unsuspecting targets — whose jobs were to stay in touch with analysts and known journalists — into the trap.

The Pentagon analyst pleaded guilty to keeping classified documents at home, for which big shots draw a fine. He is trying to reduce his 12-year sentence by testifying in June, as Rabinowitz reported, in “the first ever attempt by government prosecutors to convict private citizens under the 1919 Espionage Act.” That F.B.I. bell tolls for thee and me.

Here is the headline in the Journal that Rob Pollock, who grasped the universal civil-libertarian point of her article, put across the top of the page: “First They Came for the Jews.”

Those words are from an approximation of what Martin Niemoeller, the German pastor who outspokenly opposed the Nazis and suffered through concentration camps, said to a seminary audience in Georgia in 1959: “First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

Graphic

After reading, as always, William Safire's On Language column (on the word existential - do you pronounce it as ex-is-sential?), I skipped over to another column which caused me to send Safire this letter:-

In the Sunday Magazine of today, April 8, I found this blurb to a column written about Iraqi refugees in Cairo:-

"G. Willow Wilson is an American writer based in Egypt. She is the author, with the artist M. K. Perker, of a graphic novel, “Cairo,” due out in September."

Graphic?

That always meant to me that there was fairly explicit sex scenes in the book.

But somehow, I presume that the adjective is referring to a novel with pictures - for sure, being a novel, it would not be containing charts and data presentation forms, aka, graphs.

If existential, as you wrote, now means three things, what are we to make of graphic?

Yisrael Medad

Will let you all know what the Great Maven replies. If.