Home is a sailor

FORGIVE me, please, if I preface today’s column with a note of affectionate farewell to William F. Buckley Jr., who died at his desk on Feb. 27. He was a good friend. I sailed with him, debated with him, wrote for his magazine, and once physically restrained him from beating up on Gore Vidal. This last contribution I regret. All the rest was joy.

His death will take some getting used to. I last visited with him a year or so ago. He was in Washington to receive some bottle-cap honor at the White House. I sat on the front row with his formidable wife, Patricia, and together we applauded his remarks in acceptance. There was the familiar stammer, those pup tent brows, that incandescent smile. Now Pat is dead and Bill is dead. Even the brightest candles finally sputter out.

I remark a friendship of nearly 50 years to say something about the writing art. Bill wrote more than 50 books. Among them were a dozen spy novels. All of them were terrible. Fiction demands a gift for plot, for dialogue and for character development. But God had not bestowed these gifts upon Bill Buckley. His plots were flaccid, his characters were unbelievable, and they all talked like William F. Buckley Jr. That is, they all talked in polysyllables. Even in bed they talked that way.

His gifts as a writer were best employed in the short form. He was a master of the bullet—i.e., the pithy sentence that captures an idea and mounts it instantly on display. When he remembered to restrain that formidable vocabulary, he wrote very readable political commentary. His greatest skill as a writer was manifested, curiously, in a form of art not often recognized: He wrote superb obituaries.

In this regard he perfectly exemplified the first rule of literary sepulcher: If you would move your readers to tears, do not let them see you cry. Bill functioned in memoriam as a kind of Greek chorus. In his obituaries, a sense of shared grief was both palpable and restrained. I remember comparing one such piece to Bill’s fondness for the harpsichord. There was no loud pedal in his prose, and every string was carefully plucked.

I miss him something awful already.

Now, back to work. Specifically, let us pause over “awhile” for at least a while. Is “awhile” properly one word, or amoeba-like, does it subdivide? The question arises from an item in USA Today about an investment fund. Its assets “may take awhile to take off.”

As an adverb, the one-word “awhile” presents no problems: “The bartender will be gone awhile.” But how did “awhile” morph from an adverb into a noun? Is it the direct object of “take”? What’s going on?

English is full of puzzlements. In the same issue of USA Today, we read about an opinion of the Supreme Court. The court held that “a worker claiming age discrimination is not automatically barred from bolstering THEIR case ...” How does one worker pursue THEIR case? Aaargh! Why not try a plural construction? “The court held that workers are not barred from pursuing their cases.” Piece of cake.

Mrs. Jennie Lucas of Westfield, New Jersey, revives an old puzzlement. She asks why so many people persist in saying “if you will” at every opportunity. One might also inquire, why do lawyers preface their oral arguments with “if your honor please”?

A long time ago, relying on my total ignorance of the sailing arts, I wrote that such phrases are “yaw phrases,” i.e., something to fill the sails of discourse until our wind returns. I tried the metaphor on Buckley, who once sailed his yacht across the Atlantic. He explained the technical meaning of “yaw.” He did explain it. He really did. In words of 16 syllables.

(Readers are invited to send dated citations of usage to Mr. Kilpatrick. His e-mail address is kilpatjj@aol.com.)