Neverisms

Safire would have agreed with Kingsley Amis, who said, “If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.” In fact, he often said he enjoyed the indignation his columns aroused, once writing: “The most successful column is one that causes the reader to throw down the paper in a peak of fit.” (And yes, that was Safire’s clever way of tweaking fit of pique).

In 1996, during what came to be known as “Travelgate,” First Lady Hillary Clinton denied any role in the firing of a number of White House travel agents. Most Washington insiders took her denial with a grain of salt, considering it a standard political denial and not a binding oath. Not Safire, however. He called Mrs. Clinton “a congenital liar.” At a press briefing a few days later, a reporter asked White House press secretary Mike McCurry how the president felt about Safire’s characterization of the first lady. McCurry began by calling the article “an outrageous political attack” and then described his boss’s reaction this way:

The President, if he were not the President, would have delivered

a more forceful response on the bridge of Mr. Safire’s nose.

McCurry quickly added that the president “knows he can’t possibly do such a thing.” A few days later, Safire—ever the language maven—said he thoroughly approved of the way McCurry had phrased his original conditional statement.

Safire’s final op-ed column in 2005 was given a simple but compelling title: “Never Retire!” In the column, written when he was seventy-five, Safire said he was soon to become chairman of the Dana Foundation, which supports research in neuroscience, immunology, and brain disorders. His decision to continue working rather than retire was based on a piece of advice he had received a few years earlier from the 1962 Nobel laureate James Watson:

Never retire. Your brain needs exercise or it will atrophy.

Urging readers “to think about a longevity strategy,” Safire recommended that they lay the foundation for later endeavors while in the midst of their careers:The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril.

Safire’s advice dovetails perfectly with what gerontology experts have long recommended. In 1998, David Mahoney and Richard Restak came out with The Longevity Strategy: How to Live to be 100 Using the Brain-Body Connection. The two men distilled years of neuroscience research into thirty-one recommendations designed to increase longevity. Of their many helpful tips, one stands out:

Never retire.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill: Never, never, never retire.

Change careers, do something entirely different, but never retire.

The advice of these aging experts was echoed by Mel Brooks a year later. In a Modern Maturity interview, the seventy-two-year-old show business legend also said “Never retire,” but he gave the warning his own inimitable spin:Do what you do and keep doing it. But don’t do it on Friday. Take Friday off. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, do fishing, do sexual activities, watch Fred Astaire movies. Then from Monday to Thursday, do what you’ve been doing all your life, unless it’s lifting bags of potatoes off the back of a truck. I mean, after eighty-five that’s hard to do. My point is: live fully and don’t retreat.

When people offer advice, especially when they consider the advice important, they often choose to express themselves in the strongest possible way: always do this or never do that. You will recall from the introductory chapter that a strongly worded directive to always do something is called an exhortation, while one to never do something is called a dehortation. In this chapter, we’ll focus our attention exclusively on dehortative advice. And much of that advice, like Safire’s never retire headline, has been delivered in only two or three words:

Never procrastinate.LORD CHESTERFIELD (Philip Dormer Stanhope)

Never argue.BENJAMIN DISRAELI

Never imitate.RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Never despair.

(In Latin, nil desperandum.) HORACE (first century B.C.)

Never neglect details.COLIN POWELL

Never prejudge anybody.NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF

Not all dehortations begin with the word never, but those that do stand out. “This is an especially important recommendation,” they seem to say, “so pay attention!” This kind of admonitory advice shows up with a special frequency in the world of manners and social etiquette. In her 1922 classic Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, Emily Post wrote that the first rule of etiquette, and the one upon which all others were based, was:

Never do anything that is unpleasant to others.

In Post’s view, all of the specific rules of etiquette “merely paraphrase or explain or elaborate” upon this overarching principle. She offered a host of elaborations in her book, many expressed in what grammarians describe as a passive voice:

A gentleman should never take his hat off with a flourish.

A lady never asks a gentleman to dance, or to go to supper with her.

Elbows are never put on the table while one is eating.

By contrast, she also offered many pronouncements in an active voice. And when she wrote in this way, her rules truly commanded our attention:

Never lose your temper.

Never say “Au revoir” unless you have been talking French,

or are speaking to a French person.

Never take more than your share—

whether of the road in driving your car,

of chairs on a boat or seats on a train, or food at the table.

Never so long as you live, write a letter

to a man—no matter who he is—that you would

be ashamed to see in a newspaper above your signature.

If you think rules of etiquette occur only in high society, then you would be mistaken. In all eras of history, and in every sector of life, thoughts about what one should never do have been very popular. Some of the best have come from the rough-and-tumble frontier world of nineteenth-century America—as in this 1880s piece of “Stagecoach Etiquette” from Nebraska’s Omaha Herald:

Never attempt to fire a gun or pistol while on the road.

The writer of the article continued:It may frighten the team, and the careless handling and cocking of the gun makes nervous people nervous. Don’t discuss politics and religion nor point out places on the road where horrible murders have been committed, if delicate women are among the passengers.

This stagecoach comportment rule is a nice reminder that the concept of etiquette has been applied to men