Posted on 01/01/2010 10:11:00 AM PST by Liberty Valance
Charles Krauthammer’s joining the ranks of Daily Times columnists pleased readers on the right who like his generally — though not invariably — conservative views. Those on the left are less than thrilled.
I have my own reason for welcoming the doctor (he practiced and taught psychiatry before switching to speechwriting and then to commentary): He’s one of the endangered species called wordsmiths.
Like master artisans working precious metals, wordsmiths shape and polish lumps of words until they gleam.
Krauthammer on America’s limited activity in space: “We’ve done it with the most beautiful, intricate, complicated — and ultimately hopelessly impractical — machine ever built by man: the space shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling goods and people to a Tinkertoy we call the international space station.”
Anyone could have written that baseball’s legendary Babe Ruth was dead, but only the peerless Grantland Rice could eulogize him with, “Game called by darkness … The Big Guy’s left us with the night to face, and there is no one who can take his place. How dull and drab the field looks to the eye. The Big Guy’s gone — may the Great Umpire call him ‘Safe at Home!’”
While the rest of us rely on the euphemism “senior moments,” John Steinbeck was at once fretful and eloquent: “I was working from memory, and memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir.”
Having learned to cross the desert at night to avoid the heat, and having camped there a few times, I find Steinbeck’s description lyrical and commendably accurate: “At night in this waterless air, the stars come down just out of reach of your fingers … One may look in vain for living creatures in the daytime, but when the sun goes and the night gives consent, a world of creatures awakens. … to buzzing and to cries and to barks.”
Of Texas, he writes, “It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. For all its enormous range of space, climate and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study and the passionate possession of all Texans.”
I’ve read New Yorker-length articles that didn’t portray desert nights and/or Texas more neatly. No wonder he won the Nobel Prize for Literature!
Texas has had our share of wordsmiths. I’ve cited such writers as Dan Jenkins, Mickey Herskowitz, Bud Shrake and Blackie Sherrod previously, but sports is by no means the only area where our authors have left impressive marks. Katherine Anne Porter is an icon among short-story writers, and some of Larry McMurtry’s novels and screenplays have enjoyed critical as well as commercial success. Having grown up in ranch country (I was in school with two of McMurtry’s cousins), I can vouch unreservedly for the authenticity of accents and attitudes of his characters in “Lonesome Dove” and “Hud.”
Of the slimy side of state government, Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka wrote, “Electoral politics always lurk in the dark recesses of the legislative process” and “Republicans had been kept away from the legislative pie for so long that when they finally got to the table, they wanted to swallow it whole.”
Author-newsman Ronnie Dugger once devoted a Texas Observer issue to influential lobbyists, including one known for hosting legislators at an establishment called Hattie’s, which Dugger described neatly as staffed with “young ladies who will be nice to you for a fee.”
The deaths of William F. Buckley Jr. and William Safire cost America two of its top wordsmiths, but we still have George Will and Krauthammer.
Sir Winston Churchill reportedly said of his wartime leadership, “History will be kind to me — for I shall write it.” He certainly did: six volumes on World War II, four more on the “History of the English-Speaking Peoples” and hundreds of speeches published during and after the war — a vast body of work that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Wordsmiths can, however, be brief: “Dillinger’s dead” appears often in anthologies of classic writing.
Joseph Benham is a Kerrville journalist.
*wordsmith ping*
My absolute favorite Krauthammerism was his comment upon Obowzo’s having won the Nobel.
Charles opined that he won due to “his general splendidness.”
P.G. Wodehouse is a brilliant.
ROFL! - The man does have a way with words.
Its always fun reading threads about wordsmiths. It will be an inspiration to the grammar police to turn lose there aggression when they see improperly constructed sentences.
;)
“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma ...”
Winston Churchill
bookmark
Definitely Mark Steyn. He’s a good one.
(Sound of grey_whiskers purring.)
And I'd like to think that my essay on Pres. Bush's National Cathedral speech will someday be thought of as worthy to be named among the good columns.
http://www.ashbrook.org/events/colloqui/2005/schweikart.html
Add John Mortimer, author of the Rumpole mysteries.
'She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say "when."'
"Few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks."
'"He's blown his onion," as he soared a trifle higher with his poetic imagery.'
'She gave me the sort of look she would have given a leper she wasn't fond of.'
There’s a wordsmith ping list?
I’d love to be on it...thanks!
I miss Jack Kilpatrick’s The Art of Writing, anyone else a fan?
Ed
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