My tribute to the great wordsmith William Safire.

I need to credit William Safire for reintroducing me to the essay style and giving me a deeper love for words.

When I was nineteen or so, and not the least bit interested in academics but in acting, I developed a penchant for William Safire’s “On Language” column. He had a pedantic yet charming way of delivering his weekly etymology, but I quickly fell, platonically in love with it. I had a so-so vocabulary because I didn’t take my SAT prep all that seriously and was still bearing the brunt of it, two years after I had dropped out of St. John’s University. I wasn’t perceptive to the word maven’s political slant, although I was catching onto his colleague Anthony Lewis— I had a literary rebirth in the nineties.