Date:  Mon, 14 Apr 1997 14:04:05 EDT
<br>From:  Larry Horn  LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU 
<br>Subject: Re: With friends like this...
<br>
<br>Thanks for your comments. I agree entirely; in fact the same class of mine I
<br>referred to in my message (the one in which we've been discussing retronyms and
<br>clones of the "volunTEER volunteer" variety) we've just gotten through discuss-
<br>ing the chapter you mention, Pinker on "The Language Mavens" re Safire et al.
<br>In fact I took the occasion of their having read Pinker's exigesis of the
<br>Barbra Streisand line to get my undergraduates to come up with their own
<br>similar deconstruction of Safire's 4/6 column on "SEH-muh-null" as taboo
<br>avoidance. At the same time, I (like Pinker) do get more out of reading
<br>Safire than out of reading most of his ilk; he doesn't always condemn new
<br>usage out of hand, he often comes up with interesting examples and cites--al-
<br>though I grant that all too often he speaks with unearned authority and with
<br>an often careless and sometimes insulting disregard of previous scholarship
<br>on particular issues--cf. inter all too many alia his coverage of NOT! back in
<br>March '92, when he cited a syndicated column by Linda Shrieves of the Orlando
<br>Sentinel without bothering to track down the linguists Shrieves cited, or his
<br>various "discoveries" of lexical and grammatical constructions some of us have
<br>spent many years analyzing and writing about.  But despite his carelessness,
<br>he does have a love for language as a vibrant entity and for speakers as
<br>creative sources of innovation, which in itself distinguishes Safire from the
<br>Edwin Newmans and John Simons who seem to be interested in nothing more than
<br>standing on their soapboxes to shout out the imminent destruction of English
<br>(and to blame the permissivism of the sixties for this demise).
<br>