By Victor Greto
Ask Ben Yagoda a question, and he will take his time answering.
Even while lifting a cup of tea to his mouth, his eyes somehow remind you of a man holding out the cupped palms of his hands, weighing one and then the other, deliberately deciding.
“I’m not very articulate,” he says.
For Yagoda, 52, a word stylist and craftsman, one thinks clearly when one writes clearly, and that is one of the understated goals of his book, “When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse” (Broadway, $21.95).
“I’m really interested in two things,” says the University of Delaware journalism professor from a chair in the sparely furnished living room of his Swarthmore, Pa., home. “Language as play, art and creativity; and the way language reveals people and attitude.”
To his friends and colleagues, Yagoda’s career has been an eclectic cornucopia of teaching and writing.
“He’s the kind of writer that, when he does something, it’s clear, profound and accessible,” says Devin Harner, 32, a former student of Yagoda’s and now a professor of English and journalism at John Jay College in New York. “Despite the fact that he’s a college professor with loads of books out, he writes for a general audience. He pulls people in.”
When you first enter the Yagoda home, you can’t help but notice a few ragged red and blue political signs for Democratic candidates, both winners and losers, tucked in the winter weeds.
He lives in a town thick with foliage and large houses, with his wife, Gigi, who works as an administrator at nearby Swarthmore College, daughter Maria, 16, and Rocky, a wooly terrier the family recently got from the SPCA.
There even is a frayed sticker on the door urging John Kerry’s election.
But asked about politics, Yagoda — whose expansive face can be as expressive as the late actor Fred Gwynne’s — seems almost impatient.
“My wife’s more the leader in politics,” he says, “and I follow along.”
That’s because his fascination with the changing nature of words and creativity has little patience with political writing and speech. The writing in political magazines, in op-ed pages of newspapers, or in partisan books are some of the least playful and creative he can think of.
“It’s like the blogosphere,” Yagoda says. “Preaching to the converted is boring and tiresome. People who write about politics who really are not predictable are exceptional.”
As he has written elsewhere, Yagoda believes “that the world and language are multifarious, knotty, and illuminated by digression.”
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It’s the traditional, journalism-based, eclectic nature of his interests that has driven his major work — a 1993 biography of Will Rogers; co-editor of a 1997 historical anthology of literary journalism; a history of the New Yorker magazine published in 2000; and 2004’s “The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing.”
Aside from teaching journalism at UD for the past 15 years, he has written many profiles, book reviews and articles for magazines and newspapers, both major and minor, including language columns for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate and the New York Times Magazine.
His work has appeared in The American Scholar and Philadelphia Magazine, the New York Times Book Review and Rolling Stone, among many others.
The subjects of those articles range from profiles of actors Fred Willard, Uma Thurman and Philadelphia Phillies baseball player and announcer Richie Ashburn, to issues of style in writing, dealing with clichés, idioms, and the recent publishing fascination with overblown subtitles.
Yagoda’s colleagues look to his background in journalism for the foundations of his writing style and varied interests.
“I’ve spent half my career in a newsroom,” says McKay Jenkins, who a decade ago left his job at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and became a journalism professor at UD. Jenkins also has written books on varied subjects, including avalanches and a World War II U.S. mountain division.
“We’re often eclectic,” he says. “The reason why some people can make a career in a newsroom is they hunger for a new story every day or one every few weeks.”
“I’m not a specialist,” Yagoda says. “I don’t like to do that.”
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If one strand has run through the fabric of Yagoda’s career, it’s a fascination with how language works.
The only child of a New York City labor-arbitrator and a homemaker, Yagoda says he first thought of being a writer in high school in New Rochelle, where the family had moved when he was two.
“I knew I had a facility with words and language,” he says. “And I was curious about the world.”
Writing clarifies what he thinks, he says. “I have a vague, inchoate reaction to things, and turning it into words proved to be something that’s deep in me.”
He studied at Yale University, where Harold Bloom taught him American poetry, and took a fiction-writing class from his freshman-year adviser David Milch, now famous for creating the HBO series, “Deadwood.”
College cultivated in him a penchant for analysis, he says, and that habit places him in a specific category of writer.
“There are those two types of writers,” Yagoda says. “The ones who are out there and sincere, the romantic model; then there are the ones wearing the mask, more into craft.”
He places himself squarely into the category of craftsman-artist, along with his favorite musician, Bob Dylan.
Each writing type is prone to good and not-so-good things, he says.
“The romantic has strength of feeling, but then they are prone to self-indulgence and self-pity and sameness. You burn out quicker.”
David Friedman, a former journalist who now writes books in New York City, calls Yagoda his “bentor.”
“I learned a lot about writing from him,” says Friedman, who worked at the Philadelphia Daily News as a television critic, and is the author of “A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis.”
One of the things he learned from Yagoda is something almost too obvious, but instructive, he says. “When you’re writing, you have a god-like power, you are the creator here, and everything that happens on this page you make happen. You want to use the power wisely and well, but remember to use it.”
Friedman also consistently taps into Yagoda’s language skills.
“I consider myself pretty good at grammar,” Friedman says. “But to this day, if I have a real question about language and usage, I call Ben. And he’s not a pedant about it.”
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Yagoda’s book on the eight parts of speech — verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections — is breezy, but filled with fascinating detail on both the amorphous nature and power of words, and his own often-relaxed attitude toward usage.
One of Yagoda’s current language interests includes the interjection, “Awww.”
At first an interjection that expressed sadness, when it is elongated, the word is used to express commiseration and cuteness. Like seeing a baby and cooing, “Awww.”
But Yagoda also has noticed — via his students, his 16-year-old daughter Maria, and his 18-year-old daughter Elizabeth, now a freshman at Vassar — that teens tend to inflect their voices upward at the tail end, stopping short — “Aww-uh” — as if commenting on the cuteness of cuteness, or even stopping themselves short of uncynical appreciation.
“The concept of cuteness fascinates me,” Yagoda says. Of the teen version, “It’s a kind of stylized expression, like putting Awww in quotes.”
In general, no matter how “technically wrong” the use of a word is, Yagoda says, “If a word or phrase provides meaning, it’s fine.”
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After graduating from Yale, Yagoda became an editor and writer in New York City with the bi-weekly New Leader, “America’s most significant obscure magazine,” he says, then under the editorship of Myron “Mike” Kolatch.
He got the job after freelancing a book review for the magazine toward the end of his college career.
“I was so delighted when the review was published that it didn’t occur to me to wonder why I wasn’t paid for it,” Yagoda wrote in a piece for The American Scholar. “I graduated from college some months later — just, it so happened, as one of the magazine’s two assistant editors decided to leave. I got the job, a cubicle, and a $7,500 salary. In return, I had to promise to stay for two years. ‘You’ll get a better education than journalism school,’ Mike told me.”
Did he? “Well, I never went to journalism school, so how could I know?”
At the New Leader, Yagoda says he learned “to take language all apart. (Kolatch) told me it had to flow like water.”
Subletting an apartment for $200 a month in the late 1970s, Yagoda freelanced articles and fact-checking services after his New Leader stint.
It was the beginning of Yagoda’s see-saw, love-hate relationship between freelancing and working on a staff.
“I got by,” he says.
Yagoda’s love for freelancing and writing books on a variety of subjects is crystallized in something Friedman calls “the Yagoda rule: There’s only one reason to write a book. Because you want to. You can’t count on it being a success, so don’t worry about who’s going to buy it. Just make it the best you can make it.”
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After a two-year stint as associate editor and then editor-in-chief of the general interest New Jersey Monthly magazine, from 1982-1985, Yagoda became an editor at Philadelphia Magazine, where he supervised freelancers and also wrote articles.
It was there he met Ronnie Polaneczky, then a copy editor for the magazine, and now a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News.
Polaneczky says that she and a handful of writers and editors and freelancers still meet with Yagoda several times a year to talk about writing — and to complain about editors.
Yagoda left Philadelphia Magazine because he got the itch to freelance again.
But that soon ended when he got a job with the Philadelphia Daily News as a movie critic and then a wife.
Yagoda married Gigi Simeone in 1987. They met through a mutual friend. She worked at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was an administrator. He eventually decided to go there to earn a Masters Degree in American Civilization.
By the end of the 1980s, he was ready to again to leave the newsroom and get serious about teaching journalism. He started as an adjunct instructor at Temple University.
Yagoda also indulged his interest in 20th-century American culture and his desire to write a book.
He found a perfect subject: American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935).
“I liked spending time in his head,” Yagoda says. “He was a genius as a communicator and was opportunistic.”
Rogers interested Yagoda because he was able to express a homespun persona through the burgeoning tools of mass culture, including radio, newspapers and even movies. Rogers’ shtick proved irresistible to the changing America of the 1920s and 1930s.
It took Yagoda nearly four years to research and write the book. By the time it was published in 1993 to good reviews, he had applied and gotten a job as an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Delaware. He became full professor in 2001, a year after his book about the New Yorker was published, during the year the magazine celebrated its 75th anniversary.
His following two books, including “When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It,” indulged his love of language and style.
His next book, however, will be different.
“It’s the first time a publisher ever came to me,” he says. It will explore the genre of autobiography and memoir.
The idea for the book was inspired by the famous exchange early last year between Oprah Winfrey and James Frey, author of a “A Million Little Pieces,” after Winfrey discovered that Frey had fabricated most of the book he had shopped as a memoir.
Yagoda’s book will delve into “issues of truth and why people are so into the memoir as a genre. The whole ‘misery’ thing is recent,” Yagoda says, citing Augusten Burroughs’ memoir of a dysfunctional family, “Running With Scissors,” and David Pelzer’s memoir of childhood abuse, “A Child Called It.”
“It’ll have what all my books have in common,” Yagoda says, already weighing the pros and cons in the cupped hands of his eyes.
That is, it will be filled with an academic’s obsession for research and documentation, coupled with jargon-free, informal style of writing.
But don’t bother asking how he thinks about it yet.
He’ll know exactly after he writes it.