My Impromptus today has some politics, some Americana, some golf, some language — you know, the usual. I thought I would supply another language item here in the Corner.
Something caught my eye on Twitter the other day. There was a controversy surrounding Drew Barrymore. She was out enjoying the rain. And this was racist or something. Don’t ask me to make sense of it: It was a modern controversy.
And someone tweeted, “Giving oxygen to the Libs of TikTok account enables stochastic terrorism.”
Forget the “terrorism” part — I was arrested by “stochastic.” Such a WFB word. I don’t see it out in the wild much. Years ago, I saw it on a balloon.
I’d better explain. Or rather this news account, from the New York Times, dated January 15, 1986, will explain. “Epigones Roast Buckley With Hot Air Balloons.”
The event was the 20th-anniversary celebration of Firing Line. The emcee was Jeff Greenfield, the Democratic politico-turned-journalist. Bill was like that — involving smart, witty people from the other side. From any side. Among the speakers on that occasion were Eugene McCarthy and John Kenneth Galbraith — two lions of the Left.
In his role as emcee, Greenfield asked, “What tribute could measure up to William F. Buckley? Naturally, no one agonized over this more than Mr. Buckley himself. He had some wonderful ideas. Unfortunately, there is no more room on Mount Rushmore, and the five-dollar bill was taken.”
Greenfield further said, “Most television shows attempt to seek the biggest possible audience. Mr. Buckley has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t care if anyone is watching. All you need to do is listen to his choice of words, which we honor tonight with these balloons — which are, appropriately enough, filled with hot air.”
What the organizers had done was put characteristic Buckley words on balloons: “stochastic,” “meiotic,” “eristic,” “tergiversation,” etc.
In 1996, Doubleday published WFB’s language collection, Buckley: The Right Word. I reviewed it for The Weekly Standard, here. Editing the book was Samuel S. Vaughan, a brilliant man whom WFB prized.
I’m going from memory, but I’m pretty sure that Vaughan said something like this: “Buckley will use the word ‘stochastic’ and the word ‘Wow!’ in the same column. The conventional columnist will use neither — because the one is too fancy and the other too common.”
WFB was known for fancy words. But what he was really interested in was the right word — the mot juste, whether it was fancy or not.
Other writers whom Sam Vaughan edited included Bruce Catton and Dwight D. Eisenhower. His obituary in the Times (February 2012) says that “it was Mr. Vaughan who persuaded Mr. Buckley, a friend, to try his hand at fiction, a suggestion that produced the Blackford Oakes series of spy novels.”
Enough Memory Lane — but it has been a pleasant stroll, for me. He was such a big, and protean, and marvelous, character, Bill Buckley.