His writing was so vivid because it was, along with much else, picturesque. Not many of our country’s working essayists (they hold guild meetings in a pantry at Joseph Epstein’s apartment) and none of its judges could handle metaphor and simile so deftly. I dip at random into a collection of his opinions and find a rebuke to justices who assess the meaning of a law, not by what it says, but by its legislative history, the political circumstances that led to its enactment — a loosey-goosey method that allows judges to do a little legislating themselves. Scalia’s images sharpened his point: “We do not judge statutes as if we are surveying the scene of an accident; each one is reviewed not on the basis of how much worse it could have been but on the basis of what it says.”

And so did his gift for caricature, in the next sentence: “It matters not whether this enactment was the product of the most partisan alignment in history or whether, upon its passage, the Members all linked arms and sang, ‘The more we get together, the happier we’ll be.’ ” In the mind’s eye a reader moves from a wreckage-strewn highway to a campfire singalong with Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell and somehow never loses track of the argument: good work for a single paragraph.

Even at its most grave, his writing was touched with humor. The greatest American prose stylists — Mark Twain or E. B. White, H. L. Mencken or A. J. Liebling — are at any moment a beat or two away from sounding a raspberry or cracking a wry or wicked smile; it’s part of what makes them American. In Scalia you often found it in his casual use of a burlesque word. We will be a stronger, more confident nation for Scalia’s having returned “argle-bargle” to the national discourse, along with “jiggery pokery” and many others.