Tom Torriglia happily proclaims himself part of the grammar police, and he even started a group called NAGG (the National Association of Good Grammar).

But already I don’t trust him. He insists that the “correct” way to say 2010 is “twenty ten,” arguing that we pronounced 1812 “eighteen twelve” and the 1960’s the “nineteen sixties.” Torriglia goes so far as to say “twenty aught nine” for last year. Were the rest of us misled during the aughts—two thousand one and onward—seduced by Arthur C. Clarke and his 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Here’s the thing: the pronunciation of 2010 is not a grammar issue, it’s a usage issue. (See my brief explanations of grammar, style, and usage in Online and on the Shelf.)

I’m with Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, who comments that both pronunciations are equally correct—if there is such a thing—though he predicts that twenty ten is going to take over. “It’s shortest,” he explains. “It’s easiest to understand.”

I think Torriglia once played his accordion at a book party I threw. He’s a great guy. But for now I trust his musical notes more than his nagging.

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Dictionary of Modern American Usage. (Oxford University Press, 2003). At 928 pages, this comprehensive and complete book represents the gold standard to many in the trade. Its author, Bryan Garner, has been called “the wunderkind of American dictionary-making.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. (Merriam-Webster, 1994). Of the many usage manuals on the market, copy editors often prefer this one, as they do its cousin in the dictionary department. Authoritative, comprehensive, and easy to read, it follows a “descriptive” rather than a “prescriptive” philosophy.

The Careful Writer. (New York: Atheneum, 1977). Theodore M. Bernstein first put together this glossary of stylistic snares in 1965, after a long career as an editor at the New York Times. Bernstein writes oh-so-cleanly, and with occasional sly humor, about usage, which he calls the “spit and polish” that gives writing precision, accuracy, clarity, and color.

The Accidents of Style. (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010). Another book for those who love splitting hairs—and splitting infinitives. In other words, writers who care about nuance and can tell which false rules deserve to be flouted. Charles Harrington Elster updates The Careful Writer, writing smartly about more than 350 other thorny usage questions.

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1. The lowdown on dictionaries

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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