Language as the Ultimate Spectator Sport : YOU COULD LOOK IT UP <i> by William Safire (Times Books: $22.50; 357 pp., illustrated) </i>

William Safire, the former Republican speech writer, was an alliterative and pugnacious sort, the man who gave Spiro Agnew his nattering nabobs. William Safire, the trenchant New York Times political commentator, tends to be more fair and almost as much fun. William Safire, the weekly syndicated columnist on the life of the English language is the least dogmatic and most amusing Safire of all. There is something good to be said about a man who occasionally forgets politics, sex and religion to tackle the truly controversial subject of correcting other people.

In a slothful world where some nouns mutate into clumsy verbs--”he accessed his message system”--and other nouns grow “ize” to become overdressed verbs--”she accessorized her outfit”--disputes about diction, derivation and everyday use have a quaint character among a limited following, an audience comparable to the crowd that cares about polo matches or aleatory music concerts. But passionate.

A select group of media Americans has always taken words and grammar and syntax to written account, usually honorably. E. B. White, the magnificent essayist, revived and amplified William Strunk Jr.’s “The Elements of Style.” Theodore M. Bernstein was for years the New York Times’ guardian of usage and his books, including “Watch Your Language,” served warnings--as uncompromising as subpoenas--on journalists and others who sinned. The Los Angeles Times has its own Style Book, available to the outside world, and its own arbiter of English, Fred Holley, a deceptively cheery looking man who scrawls “ouch” over the most heinous constructions set to print. Even television, where words are only handmaidens to images, produced the likes--and dislikes--of Edwin Newman, whose “Strictly Speaking” was a 1970s best seller. Magazine writer, author and editor William K. Zinnser delivered “On Writing Well” at the turn of the ‘80s and has just published “Writing to Learn.”

These admirable men and their admirable books do not take Safire’s risks, however. “You Could Look It Up” includes a willingness to admit error plus the contributions of opposing voices. Readers have room to rebut. The charms of this fifth collection of columns--more than 150 pieces and bits--are in the fields of play and the margins of dispute. Some of the letter-writing contributors enjoy celebrity in word-related places: Tom Brokaw, Jacques Barzun, Robert MacNeil. Others are simply smart people ready to battle at the drop of an apostrophe.

Safire includes games; he admits, for instance, a habit of turning words into women’s names, a pastime he thought to be his peculiar solitaire until he discovered readers enjoyed the same habit. Safire’s samples include Natalie Attired and Helen Highwater. Respondents offered Anna Rexia, Rachel Prejudice, Ida Claire and Gerry Mander.

Such inspirations, in turn, reminded me of a game Bill Bridges played in Los Angeles at the turn of the ‘60s. As soon as cook book author/photographer Bridges discovered an ecdysiast calling herself Beverly Hills performing on--where else?--Sunset Strip, he began naming other potential competitors in honor of local geography: Mala Boo, Laurel Canyon and Ana Heim among them.

The word none enjoys three pages of singular or plural argument, continuing a controversy begun in prior pieces and fought in editorial offices all over the country. Safire considers the word generally plural, to be followed by a plural verb, as in “Obviously, none of these previous noun usages offer a clue to the term’s current meaning.” He thinks of “none” as meaning “not any” or “not ones.” Holley, the man about “ouch,” agrees. Yet some of us, old-fashioned us, continue to interpret “none” as “not one” or “no one.” While none of these minuscule--yes minuscule, not miniscule--matters is a cause for World War III, such arguments among the fervent are what make Safire and his readers so endearing, linguistic angels sometimes dancing on the head of a pun.