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It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

William Safire

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William Safire
Age: 79 †
Born: 1929
Born: December 17
Died: 2009
Died: September 27
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
William Lewis Safire
Avoid
Word
Language
Use
Writing
Diminutive
Long
Behooves
Never
Superlatives
Oxymoron

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We are all environmentalists now, but we are not all planetists. An environmentalist realizes that nature has its pleasures and deserves respect. A planetist puts the earth ahead of the earthlings.
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Different regions may require different strategies, as President Bush has noted, but not different basic principles. It's either collective security or selective security.
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The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.
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Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
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Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day.
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Some handsome and ambitious men believe they are above all morality, and a woman's virtue becomes a mere challenge to them.
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What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
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Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic term, perhaps one with a nuance that flatters my readership's exquisite sensitivity.
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[Senators John Kerry & John Edwards] have risen high in Democratic polls with a brand of class resentment and soak-the-rich rhetoric rooted in the old-fashioned liberalism of Ted Kennedy.
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After eating, an epicure gives a thin smile of satisfaction a gastronome, burping into his napkin, praises the food in a magazine a gourmet, repressing his burp, criticizes the food in the same magazine a gourmand belches happily and tells everybody where he ate a glutton empraces the white porcelain alter, or more plainly, he barfs.
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To communicate, put your words in order give them a purpose use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.
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When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.
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The Republicans do not look on the Democrats as the evil empire.
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Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?
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The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril.
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As long as one American is hungry... then we have unfinished business in this country.
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One challenge to the arts in America is the need to make the arts, especially the classic masterpieces, accessible and relevant to today's audience.
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If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.
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Adapt your style, if you wish, to admit the color of slang or freshness of neologism, but hang tough on clarity, precision, structure, grace.
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To be accused of 'channeling' is to be dismissed as a ventriloquist's live dummy, derogated at not having a mind of one's own.
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