I’ve always had a soft spot for William Safire. Of course, I’m too young to hold against him his swordsmanship as Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, especially since the phrases that survived that period—“nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history”—seem more laughable than irksome. (Any wordsmith knows that alliteration should never be carried that far.) Even his nastier jabs—calling Hillary Clinton “a congenital liar”—lost their sting in the repartee that followed (a Clinton aide said that the chief of state, “if he were not president,” would have busted Safire’s nose; Safire parried by praising the use of the subjunctive.)

He may have co-opted the Hindu word for “priest” to describe his political commentary, but it was as a language pundit that I came to follow Safire. I first read his syndicated column in the San Francisco Chronicle when I was a young writer. I can’t tell you how many pieces I clipped and copied, forcing them on high-school students and wannabe writers. He was witty on who and whom, tart on tautologies; from Safire I learned that syntax could be sexy, that writing about language could charm.

My true fondness for Safire, though, came in the mid-90s, when I was copy chief at Wired magazine. In a twist on the Oedipal process Harold Bloom describes (in which young writers slay their literary fathers), I made the keyboard my epée, tsk-tsking him for not knowing that zines (from the science-fiction fanzines, which had morphed into webzines and e-zines) were not spelled “zeens.”

That led to my most thrilling Safire moment, in 1996, when Safire recommended my book Wired Style as a Christmas “Gifts for Gab.” I read that particular New York Times magazine column while sitting in a white nightie in my sunny bay window in California. I jumped up, put on a recording of batá drums, and danced to a chant honoring the Afro-Cuban deity Obatala, god of creativity and justice. Not the usual response, surely, to Safire’s “On Language,” but it conveys the power of the moment.

In Safire’s generation (and earlier) the language gods were white, Eastern men—H.W. Fowler, William Strunk, E. B. White, James Kilpatrick, John Simon. There was something subversive about—if not exactly earning a seat at the table—at least having my book in the column.

Friends teasingly dubbed me The Cyber Safire, and the jousting continued. I unchivalrously chided him for insisting that into was the right preposition to follow jacked. No, no, I argued—in is a particle when it follows jack, or log, or for that matter tune, and it needs to retain its terse identity. Safire, or rather his assistants, started calling when questions surfaced about tech terms—coordinates instead of “phone numbers,” blog as a verb. I never talked to the man himself, but every now and then a surprise would arrive by mail: the latest Safire tome, thoughtfully inscribed.

I’m sad that he’s gone. And grateful for his exhilarating example.

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