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Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?

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
Noun
Nouns
Straight
Available
Quite
Use
Right
Writing

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Give your main clause a little space. Prose is not like boxing the skilled writer deliberately telegraphs his punch, knowing that the reader wants to take the message directly on the chin.
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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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The tension between the governed and the governing is what makes the world go 'round. It's not love, it's that tension, because that tension exists in love affairs. The whole idea of control is at the heart of human relationships. Control and resistance to control.
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Sir Alec Douglas-Home, when he was British Foreign Secretary, said he received the following telegram from an irate citizen: To hell with you. Offensive letter follows.
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A book should have an intellectual shape and a heft that comes with dealing with a primary subject.
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One difference between French appeasement and American appeasement is that France pays ransom in cash and gets its hostages back while the United States pays ransom in arms and gets additional hostages taken.
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I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
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Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.
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Took me a while to get to the point today, but that is because I did not know what the point was when I started.
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Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
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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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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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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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I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
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The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
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I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.
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The wonderful thing about being a New York Times columnist is that it's like a Supreme Court appointment - they're stuck with you for a long time.
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When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.
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It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
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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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