Goodbye, Newman

(Lauditations for Mark)

Or
A Civil Tongue Stilled
Edwin Newman, the only grammarian to host Saturday Night Live, has died of pneumonia at the age of 91. Newman was to broadcast journalism what William Safire was to print, bringing erudition and wit to the defense of language while broadcasting the news in his three decades with NBC News as correspondent, anchor and critic, covering events from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and moderating two presidential debates. To hear Newman tell it, he “had a spotless record of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” such as a trip from London to Morocco, where upon landing he learned that England’s King George VI had died. His generally grumpy disposition belied his droll sense of humor and love of puns, as how he related a story about a man who used newspapers to remove moisture from his shoes, then dropped the punchline, “These are The Times that dry men’s soles.” Citing one of his grammatical pet peeves, a sign in his office read, “Abandon ‘Hopefully’ All Ye Who Enter Here.” In his 1984 Saturday Night Live appearance, Newman played an operator at a suicide hotline who takes a call from a distraught woman, and then corrects her grammar. He also read the news on David Letterman’s NBC morning show and later anchored the USA cable channel program “Weekly World News,” lending an air of authority to stories on a South Seas island tribe that worshiped boxing promoter Don King and a poltergeist that had taken up residence in a bathroom, as they are wont to do.