THE MONOSYLLABIST Steyn on Buckley

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THE MONOSYLLABIST

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Tuesday, 01 April 2008

From National Review's special memorial issue to Bill Buckley:

On the eve of the 2004 election, William F Buckley Jr was reflecting on criticism of the networks re the 2000 debacle in Florida. He noted that, in the wake of protests re the coverage, the broadcasters had abandoned their old ways, when “computers projected winners based on hygienic extrapolation”. And then he added: “There ain’t no extrapolation these days that will make the protesters go away.”

We know Bill Buckley’s the go-to guy for your “logical postulates” and whatnot. But “ain’t” is a Buckley word, too – although I’m pretty certain that’s the first time in recorded history that the English language has ever had a need for the formulation “There ain’t no extrapolation.” Is you is or is you ain’t my extrapolation? There are chaps who use words like “extrapolation” and there are those who say “ain’t” but not many who deploy both. Bill was one of the few, though he didn’t always get credit for it. Even my old friend Conrad Black, apropos the shipboard vacation he and the Buckleys took together, claimed that Bill was hopeless at Scrabble because he didn’t know any words under eight letters – which is in that particular game where the real action is.

Oh, I don’t know. Here he is, from the 1996 primary season, with a good ’un of just three letters:

Phil Gramm did not wow them in New Hampshire.

Bill believed in le mot juste, and, if le mot juste was a vernacular monosyllable, that was what he’d type. That’s why Buckley wowed them across America from the Fifties onward: He was a purposeful writer, and his words served his purposes. I once had a long conversation with him about Romano Mussolini, the son of the late Duce who after the Second World War, when the bottom dropped out of the family dictating business, became a moderately successful pianist on the Italian jazz circuit. We were discussing the reaction of folks when learning of Benito’s pedigree. Bill had been told by Carroll O’Connor of dining with a pal at some joint Mussolini was playing, and the chum said to the pianist, “Hell of a thing they did to your father.”

And I reported to Bill a similar story: The trumpeter Chet Baker, the quintessential jazzman existing in a swirl of music and drugs and barely aware what continent he was on, had been playing with the Mussolini group in Italy for quite a while before it was pointed out to him who Romano’s pop was. Hazy as his grasp on mid-20th century geopolitical events was, he knew enough to feel obliged to say something. “Gee, it’s a drag about your old man,” he commiserated.

“That’s a better line,” said Bill appreciatively, and repeated the phrase in his dulcet tones: “Gee, it’s a drag about your old man.”

Again, les mots justes. On the other hand, he despised the pol-on-the-make’s synthetic folksiness, offering a few years back this all-purpose John Edwards speech:

There’s that ole story about the lady grew up in my part of the world feedin poisoned acorns to kill the raccoons an the squirrels, next day went out an there was lots of coons an squirrels but mosly there was dead chickens! She got the wrong mix, like our president an vice president, they got the wrong mix, an we got more terrorists an the drug industry in America is gettin more medicines which we can sell only to Canadians because they get them at half price.

Etc.

He’s not the languid drawler of effete polysyllables portrayed in too many eulogies. For how, in a democratic republic whose public discourse is perforce conducted in the demotic, could such a man have had any influence? “It ain’t gonna happen” was a familiar Buckley response if one advanced some appealingly purist position on immigration or social security. He was a man who was interested in making things happen, and he couldn’t have done that if he were merely a wryly amused retailer of high-toned chit-chat full of words like “aposiopesis”. Thus the Buckley combination: he could do the extrapolation, and then figure out how to use it. Ain’t that the trick?

from National Review

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