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The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.

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
Sportscaster
Clich
Ties
Christmas
Gift
Fans
Sports
Perfect

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The CEO era gave rise to the CFO (not certified flying object, as you might imagine, but chief financial officer) and, most recently, the CIO, chief investment officer, a nice boost for the bookkeeper you can't afford to give a raise . . .
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When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.
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I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
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When your government, employer, landlord, merchant, banker and local sports team gang up to picture, digitize and permanently record your every activity, you are placed under unprecedented control.
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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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Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.
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The remarkable legion of the unremarked, whose individual opinions are not colorful or different enough to make news, but whose collective opinion, when crystallized, can make history.
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Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.
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Never feel guilty about reading, it's what you do to do your job.
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What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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Color and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others.
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Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
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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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The most successful column is one that causes the reader to throw down the paper in a peak of fit.
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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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I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
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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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Adjective salad is delicious, with each element contributing its individual and unique flavor but a puree of adjective soup tastes yecchy.
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I want my questions answered by an alert and experienced politician, prepared to be grilled and quoted -- not my hand held by an old smoothie.
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