🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate March (3/31) and for Princeton University (from the 19th century, the Princeton locomotive cheer “Rah rah rah! Tiger, tiger, tiger! Sis, sis, sis, boom, boom, boom, ah!”), plus 🐇 a rabbit for Easter (no doubt soon to be devoured by the tigers — though it will be succeeded tomorrow by a tougher trio of rabbits inaugurating the month of April, who might be foolish but have the power of three)
And so I turn to the Princeton Alumni Weekly (which is a monthly publication, but try not to dwell on that) — PAW, from now on — and my relations to it in recent years. While noting that when I die, PAW is the only place where I’m sure to get an obituary, though my Stanford department’s weekly newsletter, the Sesquipedalian, will have a notice, as will the news bulletin from the Linguistic Society of America (the LSA), and friends will say something on Facebook; otherwise, I expect my death to go publicly unremarked (and I encourage my daughter and grandchild not to spend their money on paid announcements), so at least in the death department, PAW looms large.
Now: I’ll re-play (with little further commentary) some history from the past three years in which PAW has been involved, ending with a section from my class notes in the issue that arrived in the mail yesterday (with rather more commentary).
The Zwicky Award. From my 2/21/24 posting “The discouragements of old age”:
astoundingly, I got a late-career recognition: not an award, But an award named after me, which I’ve bubbled on about on this blog for three years now. The LSA’s brief description of this award:
The Zwicky Award recognizes LGBTQ+ linguists who have made significant contributions to the discipline, the society, or the wider LGBTQ+ community through scholarship, outreach, service, and/or teaching.
So I’m famous for being queer — well for being publicly, usefully, significantly gay — and that strikes me as just wonderful. Even better than that: the LSA created it in 2021 at the instigation of its LGBTQ+ committee, composed of enthusiastic young people (of an age to be my grandchildren), who also proposed that it be named after me (making it the first LSA award named after a living linguist). To my mind, this was a huge thing.
But then, except in bulletins from the LSA, the whole business vanished almost immediately from public view. Press releases went to Stanford and Ohio State (which have campus reports originally created as faculty/staff news bulletins but over the years converted to press reports enthusiastically advertising the university) and to the Princeton Alumni Weekly (which supplies news about alumni and also solicits aggressively for the university).
… it’s … likely that the public information offices of universities view visibly celebrated queer faculty (especially ones as outspoken and plain-speaking as I am) as something of a liability, better kept at arm’s length when you’re trying to rake in money for the endowment.
Still, I was hurt when the news of the Zwicky Award didn’t even make it into my class notes in PAW.
Now, to the recent news, which included working with my Princeton class secretary [Barry Bosak] on a forthcoming class note, in which I put in an appearance as a still-working linguist, with a link to this WordPress blog (but no warning about what my classmates might encounter here).
Another Princeton ’62 award. From the Princeton Class of ’62 website on 3/5/24:
The International Coral Reef Society has established two awards in honor and memory of Dr John Ogden ’62, who served as ICRS president from 1994-1998.
I was president of the LSA in 1992 and held its Sapir Professorship in 1999. The Zwicky Award was named for me because I was the first out president of the LSA (and Jacques and I were a very prominent couple at the meeting where I delivered my presidential address; see my 10/4/21 posting “Jacques and Arnold’s presidential adventure”). Probably the stink of tainted identity is what kept the award out of PAW (and most other places).
The April 2024 PAW. Extracted from its class of 1962 column (other material precedes and follows this):
(scanned in from the issue; a digital version has not yet appeared on the PAW website or the class website)
Barry’s picked out things that were of special interest to him (cross-dialect comprehension and understanding literary texts, in particular), and had to compact things into a tightly constrained space, so the column lacks some in coherence. Among the things that were jettisoned from my extensive e-mail exchanges with Barry was my writing on gender and sexuality and, with it, the Zwicky Award.
Well, the award’s now very old news: it was announced in the summer of 2021 and there have already been three awardees (each duly chronicled on this blog). Maybe it will be noted in my PAW obituary. But maybe not. (It’s not even a sure thing that Jacques will get a mention, because he and I were not able to get married, so that he was legally no kin of mine. Ann Daingerfield, as my legal widow, will of course be noted, but Jacques might well be erased from the record.)
April 2, 2024 at 6:05 am |
my Stanford department’s weekly newsletter, the Sesquipedalian
All right, you just threw this in in passing, but I had to point out its deliciousness.
April 2, 2024 at 7:11 am |
Our little joking name has been around so long we forget it’s a joke: sesquipedalian ‘characterized by long words; long-winded’, alluding to septipedalian ‘seven-footed’ (used metaphorically for hebdomadal ‘weekly’)
April 3, 2024 at 7:01 am
I don’t see any “septi-” element in the text; did auto-correct trip you up? That only makes it even more delicious. (sesquipedalian = literally “one-and-a-half-footed”, and this reminds me of an endnote in one of Colleen McCullough’s series of novels set in 1st-century-B.C.E. Rome, where she’s explicating the formation of Roman names, and gives as an example of a cognomen the name Sesquiculus, which she helpfully explains means that the bearer of the name was “not just an arsehole, but an arsehole and a half”.)
April 3, 2024 at 7:21 am
To Robert Coren: Ah, not “+” (suggesting a portmanteau), but “alluding to”; I’ve corrected the text. The “+” was meant to convey that you get the meaning of sesquipedalian *plus* the meaning of septipedalian. Though in fact the Sesquipedalian is usually compact rather than sesquipedalian. (In its early years the newsletter duly attended to business, but the editor was also given to various entertaining digressions, so that the newsletter was occasionally sesquipedalian.)