Carrying water on the Safire front

Michael Covarrubias over at Wishydig has posted on Safire's column from yesterday. See here. (And a doff of my Madison Mallards baseball cap — it's too warm for a tuque these days — to Ben Zimmer for calling my attention to the post.) I confess that I couldn't really bear to read Safire yesterday beyond the set-up about candidates being arrayed in 'tiers' in current journalistic usage. Tiers have long been a pretty valuable notion in linguistics, but that's another story …

Wishydig makes good points, like about Bad Bill's constant confusion between OED's earliest given attestation and when a word actually arose, and noting that Safire virtually pulls a whole entry from the Oxford English Dictionary without quotes or attribution. In fact, if you strip away the corrections, Covarrubias has written the kind of content that we'd expect somebody being paid to write about the topic would write.

I've made various suggestions (over the months this blog has existed) about who the Times could hire to replace Safire when they finally fire his sorry ass, losing a few subscribers and gaining infinitely in credibility. Maybe the known journalists, lexicographers and linguists I've had in mind are too expensive. Guys, if it's the money, maybe you should hire this kid — I'm betting he carries no Watergate baggage, he can use OED and the web all by himself. Sheesh, he'd probably do the work without an assistant and save you that salary.