SOURCE: “Talk Talk,” in New Republic, February 16, 1987, pp. 28-33.

In the following excerpt, Menand offers unfavorable assessment of A Word or Two Before You Go.

Jacques Barzun, former dean, provost, and university professor at Columbia, is an authority often cited by [William] Safire when he wants to throw cold water on a usage but needs someone else to look like a pedant for doing it. For where Safire fiddles, Barzun burns. His brief pieces on language, [in A Word or Two Before You Go] written over many years and to meet a variety of occasions, attack, but with the prescriptive and proscriptive fervor missing from the “On Language” columns, the same kind of stock villains that Safire's do—psychiatrists, sociologists, advertising copywriters—along with a few real pigeons: Esperanto, Basic English, and the advocates of phonetic spelling. But Barzun reserves a special fury for the depredations of copy...