Ever since I retired from Ohio State in 1995, I’ve been living in the gig economy, mostly in various irregular and temporary appointments at Stanford, eventually ending in an odd status that is neither faculty nor staff, that of adjunct professor: someone who is presumed to be actually employed somewhere else but is available for various services to Stanford. For which I receive other services from Stanford: access to things available through the university library (for me, this is primarily free and easy access to the on-line Oxford English Dictionary) and stable document storage (most of my publications, in .pdf files, citable on-line for almost instant access by others; thousands of such citations have been embedded in my blog postings over the years).
To maintain my adjunct status, I must periodically demonstrate that I am worthy, by submitting my CV for scrutiny by the relevant dean. My actual CV is a gigantic document; the last printout was 17 pages of densely formatted material (publications, courses taught, papers delivered, honors and awards, academic service activities, graduate students advised, at three different institutions). I can’t imagine anyone gaining illumination from it.
Then, from the administrator of the Stanford linguistics department yesterday, 8/14/25:
Your current adjunct appointment is scheduled to end 8/31/25. If you are interested in renewing your affiliation, please send me your current CV and I’ll get that paperwork going with the Dean’s Office.
8/31 is only two weeks away, so there’s plenty of room for things to go wrong, even though the exercise used to be thought of as mostly pro forma, a reassurance that I was still intellectually active. Now that I’m a flaming symbol of DEI, who knows? These are perilous days.
In any case, it occurred to me to use the material from the “About AMZ” page on this blog (without the embedded links), which gives some actual sense of who I am and what I do (please don’t tell me that my work is, well, so idiosyncratic; people have been berating me about the eccentricity of my ideas and interests for at least 50 years now, without any effect). So I created, from this page, a .pdf file that my department’s administrator can submit to the dean, reproduced below. (I see now that the “About AMZ” file needs a reference to my published poetry and to exhibitions of my comic homoerotic collages.)
Below the line, the file I sent the administrator:
Arnold M. Zwicky, compressed CV (8/14/25)
Brief biography
— I received an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton (1962) and a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT (1965). After teaching four years at Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, I came to Ohio State in 1969, was named a Distinguished University Professor in 1989, and retired in 1995. Since 1985 I have been a visiting (then consulting, and now adjunct) professor at Stanford, and from September 1998 on I am based at Stanford.
— I have been active in the Linguistic Society of America (and was its president in 1992) and have taught or worked on research projects at many of the Linguistic Institutes of the LSA, from 1968 through 2007; I held the Sapir Professorship at the 1999 Institute, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
— I am a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1992); of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (elected 1998); and of the Association for Psychological Science (elected 2007). I’ve held one-year fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Stanford Humanities Center, and shorter appointments at Edinburgh, Sussex, and the Beijing Language Institute.
— in July 2021, the LSA announced the creation of an annual Arnold Zwicky Prize, to recognize distinguished accomplishments by LGBTQ+ scholars; the first winner was awarded in January 2022
— for some time now, I have been multiply disabled, largely housebound, and working entirely from home (722 Ramona St., Palo Alto CA) ; e-mail to: arnold.zwicky@gmail.com
Current research program
— since the late 1960s I’ve been investigating the interrelationships of syntax, morphology, and phonology, focusing especially on apparent counterexamples to the Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax and the Principle of Morphology-Free Syntax, as well as on phenomena (like clitics) that appear to fall within more than one component of grammar
— since around 1980, I’ve been investigating syntactic variation, paying attention to small details that mostly don’t map easily to large-scale social distinctions like region, sex, class, ethnicity, and so — especially as part of the linguistic aspects in the presentation of self
— parallel to this interest, again since around 1980, I’ve been investigating language and social organization vis-a-vis g&s (gender & sexuality), in a wide variety of domains (ranging from taboo vocabulary and insults; to the social organization of sex venues; to the visual, linguistic and narrative organization of gay porn films)
— as an offshoot of the syntactic variation research, I became interested in the “advice literature” on English syntax, and more generally, on material about usage and prescriptivism; and that returned me to earlier interests in style and in mistakes in language
— since about 1990, I’ve been using cartoons and comics as sources of data for examining linguistic and g&s phenomena; and studying the comics as an art form and narrative genre
— since about 1995, my postings to my blog have increasingly been framed as intellectual entertainments, embedding linguistic and g&s observations in playful and often deeply personal essays, with excursions into (among other things) music, poetry, art, popular culture, sexual attitudes and practices, food, plants, and animals (especially penguins and mammoths)
Links to other pages
— I was the originator (over 40 years ago) of the Ohio State Language Files, which grew from a collection of materials designed simply as a supplement for undergraduate courses into a full-fledged introductory textbook, with many editors contributing to it over the years; the current edition is the 13th, released in 2022
— I was a contributor to Language Log, where lots of interesting linguists muse about things having to do with language, from 2003 through 2017; and I was also a regular contributor to Chris Waigl’s eggcorn database for many years
— I post almost daily on my WordPress blog (arnoldzwicky.org), on topics in linguistics and in g&s studies; since 2003, I have posted about 15,000 essays on Language Log and my WordPress blog
— I was the founder of the OUTiL (OUT In Linguistics) mailing list, for lgbt(-friendly) linguists, now closed down; see my 10/23/19 posting “OUTiL: a historical note”
— I was also a long-time participant in the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss (Members Of The Same Sex), now functioning as a group on Facebook
— I have been an enthusiastic singer in the Sacred Harp (Denson Book) shape-note singing tradition since 1989; I sing now with a group in Palo Alto; before that, also with a group in San Francisco; and further back before that with a group in Columbus OH
— a collection of my academic “postcard collages” is available on-line
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