The Confessions of Philologos

In his farewell column in Mosaic, Philologos promised that I, his “creator,” as he put it, would publish an essay about him. Although I might have preferred to let his approximately 1,500 columns and their close to 1,400,000 words speak for themselves, these are not readily available, and since a promise is a promise even when made by a mere creation, I’ve chosen to keep it.

I’ve often been asked why I decided to write a language column under a pseudonym. The truth is that I would never have done it any other way. When I was approached in the late 1980s by the weekly magazine editor of a new Israeli English daily called The Nation with the request that I be, in her words, “our William Safire,” I didn’t feel well-equipped for the job. I was at the time mostly known as the author of a single book, Letters to an American Jewish Friend, and as an English translator of Hebrew and a bit of Yiddish literature, and while I had always had an interest in languages, I had no fund of knowledge about them and no wish to be accused of getting in over my head. Yet a language column did seem an attractive way of earning some needed extra income, and I told the editor that I would write one on the condition that it not come with my name. To this she agreed. Whether “Philologos” was her idea or mine, I don’t remember.

It certainly wasn’t my idea to spell it “Philologus,” which is how it appeared on page 15 of the magazine’s first issue of September 2, 1988. (The following week this was corrected.) This wasn’t, though, the page’s main gaffe, in evidence of which I possess two versions of it. In one, there is a large empty space at the center of the column, which was given the title “No Charisma.” (Its subject, discussed against the background of the Dukakis-Bush presidential campaign of that year, was the history of the word charisma and its shift over time from a theological to a social and political term.) In the other, this space is occupied by a photograph of Adolf Hitler. The editor, for some unfathomable reason, had picked it as an illustration of a charismatic politician, and when this was discovered by an aghast publisher as The Nation was rolling off the press, all already-printed copies of the magazine were destroyed except for one that I managed to salvage. Since there wasn’t time to find a substitute illustration, the space on page 15 was left blank.