'Buckley was the enfant terrible and then the eminence grise of the conservative political movement'

" ... "The New England Nasal Nip" is winsomely witty and waspish, punctilious, preppy, and pugnacious.

With bemused detachment, Buckley cedes center stage to correspondents obsessed with his appearance. A conservative, they insisted, should look like one. Instead, each week on Firing Line, Buckley was disheveled, with an ill-fitting shirt and a crooked tie. He slouched. And he scratched his head with a pencil, which he then put in his mouth. "I can't sit upright," Buckley confessed. "Congenital." Nor did he really want to. He was trying to distract his audience "from the hypnotic quality of my reasoning. Otherwise my points of view would overwhelm the public; and that would be the end of Firing Line."

The English language, however, was no laughing matter. After all Buckley's favorite occupation is "the correction of other people's errors." So he settles a Scrabble squabble by disqualifying the word "jader" (the comparative is inappropriate for a mineral) but accepting "whiter," even though "white" connotes the absence of color. And he lambastes a teacher for suggesting that Buckley invented the phrase "to immanentize the eschaton." The term, he explains, subjects to human dominion that which is beyond time. ... "

~ From Passion for linguistic precision: a review of Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription - Notes & Asides from National Review ~