Under the header “Howdy” (a folksy salutation I rarely encounter), this e-mail from 3/4 (somewhat edited):
I was in your syntax class at Stanford in the late 80s …
Recently had a colleague [who] said he was basing [a] clitics and circumclitics paper on your theories! So, thought I’d say hello and thank you for not flunking me.
Now, I get an unbelievable amount of ill-intentioned mail from trollers, spammers, and seekers of commercial deals; now that these annoying entities have access to impressive AI programs, their junk e-mail regularly makes reference to details of my published work and is generally pretty sophisticated in its attempt to gain my confidence. That “Howdy” really was a red flag; also, although Howdy Boy wouldn’t have been the first former student to thank me for not flunking him, it’s a rare event, and might just have been a clever stroke to catch my attention.
On the other hand, his colleague’s paper was said to be about the language Miluk (a language I don’t recall having heard of before; it’s an extinct Coosan language of Oregon), and his e-name was miluk — two things lending some verisimilitude to him. And then his signature was
Troy Anderson, ‘89/‘90
which would put him at Stanford when I taught my really big Intermediate Syntax course, Linguistics 121, in winter quarter 1989 (more on this course in an appendix to this posting; but it’s relevant here that enrollment in the course was unexpectedly gigantic, requiring the last-minute hiring of a raft of additional grading assistants, who I then had to co-ordinate and manage, and making my memory of individual students quite hazy). But then “Troy Anderson” is the sort of everyday name that trollers and spammers make up.
Alas, my net experience includes astonishingly inventive malicious trollers, whose only purpose is to demonstrate their cleverness by deceiving otherwise intelligent people and wasting their time; and, a few months back, being disastrously defrauded by people who did a remarkable job of creating detailed counterfeits of a series of commercial websites. So I’m really really cautious. (Yes, this is a truly grotesque way to have to live.)
The next chapter. A search for Troy Anderson Stanford ’89 got me what purported to be a Stanford Magazine feature story in its Nov/Dec 2004 issue: “You Go, Guy” by Chaney Rankin, about Go-playing Stanford football player Troy Anderson ’89/’90, now a business executive, who got a BA in anthropology, coterming in linguistics; and as a member of the Coquille tribe in Oregon compiled a dictionary of its lost language, Miluk, for his MA thesis (information on the Coquille and Miluk to follow). Well, there’s the Miluk, and of the (at least) three Troy Andersons who’ve been associated with Stanford football, one did in fact graduate in ’89 (with a BA) and ’90 (with that MA). But was that Stanford Magazine story legit? I mean, a football player — offensive tackle, to be specific — who’s a significant figure in the Go world, with a commitment to documenting (and, it turns out, revitalizing) his extinct tribal language? Sounds too good to be true.
Stanford Magazine is the university’s alumni magazine, also serving as p.r. for the university, especially its undergraduate programs, with the immediate goal of keeping alumni in touch with their class and the university as a whole and the larger goal of soliciting money for the university. Well, the purported Stanford Magazine piece. Because this looked like a parody of the sort of stuff that university press bureaus create for alumni magazines to extract contributions — look what astounding undergraduates your dollars are paying for, why here’s a guy who speaks eight languages, is a varsity player in both baseball and basketball, teaches art to inner city kids, and recently solved two outstanding problems in the algebraic theory of numbers, SO GIVE US MONEY! — I went to some trouble to verify the Stanford Magazine piece (it has excellent archives, in which individual issues can be viewed page by page). And will give you a somewhat abbreviated version of it below.
So, Howdy Boy really is Troy Anderson ’89/’90. Awesome. The breezy style of his first e-mail to me is the informality of a genuine guy-guy. Doing me the honor of treating me as just another guy (though he surely remembered from 1989 that I’m gay; in fact, my man Jacques was one of the graders for the course). But how could he have nearly failed in my course? I wrote to Troy:
It occurred to me that if there was any chance of your flunking out, it would have been because you were juggling too many balls at once, always a danger for very smart manic multi-taskers, as you obviously were at the time (and probably still are).
(In my experience, very smart manic multi-tasker is a not uncommon configuration. On occasion, vexing for everyone concerned, of course.) Well, that was a fair cop. And then things got still more complicated. In ways I will leave for a further posting. Because I have now accumulated a lot of background stuff to show you.
When Troy Anderson arrived at Japan’s professional Go academy, where the world’s top players are schooled in the 4,000-year-old Asian game of stones, he thought he would have “this Kung Fu experience. I figured I would have to shave my head, wear a robe and take a vow of silence.”
What Anderson, a 6-foot-7 former offensive tackle for Stanford, did not expect was a school full of Nintendo-playing 9-year-olds who, despite his years of study, beat him at every game.
TA’s LinkedIn photo, in which he presents himself as an available and amiable business executive; in a suit, but not a plain dark suit, and without a tie; with a pleasant half-smile (his most natural facial expression is a full smile, but here he’s being serious for business), which takes the edge off his overall appearance (he’s a huge bear of a man, very tall and impressively muscled)… Anderson came to Go when a torn rotator cuff kept him cooped up in Soto [dormitory] his sophomore year. By his senior year, he had joined Stanford’s Go Club, sold his car to pay for lessons with the top amateur player in the United States (then working as a waiter at Su Hong in Menlo Park) and advanced to the rank of 5-dan, the Go equivalent of a fifth-degree black belt in karate. … After earning his BA in anthropology and coterming in linguistics, he packed his bags for Tokyo.
Anderson, who now manages online development for the Fannie Mae Foundation in Bethesda, Md., earned an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management in 1998. He combined his diverse interests in writing The Way of Go: 8 Ancient Strategy Secrets for Business and Life. Published … by Free Press, the book is “a taxonomy of strategy.” … Anderson organizes chapters into yin-and-yang pairs of strategies (such as reverse / forward and owe / save) with anecdotes that illustrate Go’s everyday utility. The ’80s cola wars, for example, can be viewed in terms of global / local strategy — should a wise executive spend money lining up Michael Jackson for an ad campaign or securing a monopoly on football stadium vending machines?
Anderson had some experience cataloguing similar patterns while at Stanford. A member of the Coquille tribe from the Pacific Northwest, he [compiled a dictionary] of its lost language, Miluk, for his master’s thesis. He had a tape recording made by an anthropology fieldworker. When he played it for his grandmother, she recognized the voice — “That’s my mother!” — and Anderson learned that his great-grandmother was one of Miluk’s last speakers.
The Coquille and Miluk. From Wikipedia:
The Coquille (/ˈkoʊkwɛl/) are a Native American people who historically lived in the Coquille River watershed and nearby coast south of Coos Bay. They were signatories of the Oregon Coast Tribes Treaty of 1855 and were subsequently removed to the Siletz Reservation in northwestern Oregon in 1856. Most Coquille people today live there as members of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, but some whose ancestors remained in the traditional homeland or fled the reservation now make up the Coquille Indian Tribe, centered in southwest Oregon where the Coos River flows into Coos Bay.
… The Coquille people historically spoke two languages, Miluk, a Coosan language, and the Upper Coquille dialect of Lower Rogue River, a Pacific Coast Athabaskan language classified as part of the Oregon Athabaskan subgroup. After relocation to the Siletz Reservation, Coquille people had to resort to communicating in Chinuk Wawa, the lingua franca on the reservation, which was composed of many languages foreign to each other in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Coquille Indian Tribe is involved in language revitalization efforts for both Miluk and Upper Coquille Athabaskan
TA is seriously committed to the revitalization project for Miluk — preparing teaching materials, filming some videos, etc.
The 1989 syntax course. I taught versions of this course over some years at Ohio State and Stanford. I also worked for some years on turning my materials for it into a textbook, but eventually it appeared it wouldn’t be commercially viable, and then I had no further opportunities for teaching the course.
However, I had copies of the syllabus, homework assignments, and exams for the 1989 Stanford incarnation of the course, which I scanned in and formatted for posting a few years ago: on 1/23/18, in “Syntax assignments from 20 years ago”.
At the same time, I began doing similar scanning and formatting for chunks of the text draft; you can see some of this material in my 2/10/18 posting “Syntext: basic concepts”. (The scanning and formatting are incredibly tedious and time-consuming; when I got sicker and more disabled, I abandoned the task, so the remaining pages still sit, quietly accusing, on my TO DO table.)
In any case, if he wants to, TA can revisit the material that gave him trouble back in 1989. More on this in the next posting.
March 9, 2024 at 5:26 am |
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