WASHINGTON — Conservative columnist William Safire was not quite a B student in college before dropping out and beginning a career that would ta...

The New York Times Magazine has named Ben Zimmer its "On Language" columnist. Zimmer, described in the Times' announcement as a linguist and lexicogr...

Since the death of William Safire, political columnist who wrote the regular "On Language" feature in the New York Times Magazine, no one has truly assumed the mantle of leading linguistic watchdog.

2009 may go down as the year of celebrity deaths — in no small part due to Walter Cronkite, who passed away in July and whose September memorial...

Tom Friedman will realize that he's losing his success rate to the average stopped clock and retire to focus on writing non-political travel books. They will be very short. But somehow still turgid.

David Bromwich seems to me better yet at Obama-watching than at press criticism. He can write with penetration of Barack Obama as an American almost-l...

NEW YORK — William Safire, the conservative columnist and word warrior who feared no politician or corner of the English language, died Sunday a...

William Safire's career took him from public relations to propaganda to column-writing in a single seamless progression.

Is the death of an esteemed giant in American journalism less newsworthy than a second-tier celebrity wedding?

It's clear the conservative press has little interest in ascertaining the veracity of right-wing smears against Sotomayor before advancing them.

According to William Safire, Obama's speech was a failure because it was "all too like the collectivist fantasy that opened and closed the Beijing Olympics."

Today the OUPblog is honored to have William Safire author of Safire's Political Dictionary to write about the origins of blogging. Safire began his w...