RIP: James J. Kilpatrick

We lost four noted men of words in 2010, as Ben Zimmer writes in The New York Times. One was James J. Kilpatrick, a newspaper columnist. Zimmer:

James J. Kilpatrick (b. 1920) had a distaste for pompous and hackneyed language, and he never shied away from expressing his opinion vociferously — no surprise to anyone who read his prickly political commentary or saw his rants in the “60 Minutes” debate segment “Point-Counterpoint.”

“When I conclude that a particular usage is execrable, I can execrate at the top of my lungs,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1984 The Writer’s Art, also the title of his long-running syndicated column.


The usage guru Bryan A. Garner told me that he long admired Kilpatrick’s pugnaciousness and iconoclasm. After Garner published the first edition of his Dictionary of Modern American Usage in 1998, the two men found that they were kindred spirits in language matters.

But they didn’t see eye to eye on everything: they had an ongoing debate over beginning sentences with “and” or “but” (Garner was in favor of the practice; Kilpatrick dead-set against it). Ultimately, as befits the author of “The Writer’s Art,” Kilpatrick’s appreciation of language was an aesthetic one. In his waning years, he gave Garner this advice on ending a column: “End it on an accented syllable, preferably with a long vowel.” In other words, not with a whimper but a bang.