Words, word, words!

I'm devastated that William Safire has stopped (as of last December, IIRC) writing a regulary Op-Ed for the Times. I have to now resort to getting my fix in the Sunday magazine. His column there of today is not the most objectively interesting subject matter -- he talks about the "blurbosphere," or the world of literary peer review and back-patting -- but it's a mandatory read, if only to hear the following words (and phrases) in context:

• blurbosphere
  
• hagiography
  
• firmament
  
• fulsome
  
• oxymoronic
  
• "prepublication pool of prevarication"
  
• panned
  
• "espionage tradecraft"
  
• exegesis
  

He ends with titling an ongoing war of mine the "Language Snobs against Language Slobs", and intelligently admonishes:

Good writers are free to break the rules of grammar, but their freedom gains meaning when they know the rules and overrule them only for an artistic or polemical reason.