Tomorrow is 11/22; on my calendar this brings up a set of two deeply discordant anniversaries and the birthday of an admirable colleague and friend. And this year 11/22 is the date of Stanford’s preeminent sporting event, to add a note of passionate silliness to the whole business.
1 and 2: discordant anniversaries. From my 11/22/25 posting “Discordant moments”:
☹️ 🎶 Once again 11/22 brings us both an immensely sad anniversary (of JFK’s assassination, in 1963) and a day of joyous celebration (St. Cecilia’s Day, honoring the patron saint of music and musicians; see my 11/21/11 posting “Saint Cecilia”) — a maximally discordant moment that comes around every year.
Here’s the refrain from W. H. Auden’s “Hymn to St. Cecilia / Anthem for St. Cecilia’s Day”, set to music by Benjamin Britten:
Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
3: a notable birthday. Of Brian Joseph, born 11/22/51, now retired (in June 2024) from official duties at Ohio State, so he is now, like me, a DUPE (Distinguished University Professor Emeritus) there — and free to roam the world, being illustrious. Check out his Wikipedia entry for some of the details.
Now I re-play something I wrote a few years ago about Brian; think of it as a mini-encomium on the occasion of his birthday (unfortunately, it resists being set to music); from my 1/07/21 posting “Time, and intellectual community”: a piece about
Brian Joseph’s “What is time (and why should linguists care about it)?”, an article that originated as his presidential address at the Linguistic Society of America … annual meeting in New Orleans on 4 January 2020. The article … combines broad humanistic scholarship with fine-grained philological and dialectological research on the Greek language.
Meanwhile, the article is thick with thanks to all sorts of people, a characteristic that is not just personal niceness — though in some cases it is certainly that — but reflects a view about the nature of intellectual community.
… I was struck that Brian repeatedly goes out of his way to thank people for their contributions, to this particular paper and to the development of his ideas in general; and for supplying parts of an intellectual framework for his work (even from some time back). The total number of thanks (of various kinds) is just enormous.
My understanding of this was not that Brian was just being a nice guy (though he is in fact a famously nice guy), but was instead recognizing that the intellectual life of our field is the product of a complex community of scholarship and theorizing stretching far afield and far back in time.
As it turned out, my impression accorded exactly with Brian’s ideas: the intent was his equivalent of “it takes a village”, applied to our general intellectual endeavor and to the more specific enterprise of doing linguistics.
It’s lovely to see this point made at such length and in such detail.
4: passionate silliness. The hoopla, hijinks, and gridiron grit of a Big Game: Stanford meets Cal (the University of California at Berkeley) in football, in Stanford Stadium, kickoff at 4:30 pm tomorrow. Cal’s Oski the Bear goes up against the Stanford Tree (a tree, in honor of the redwood El Palo Alto). In an ideal world, they would get into a three-match with the UCSC Banana Slugs, but you can’t have everything; still, a dopey bear vs. a ridiculous tree ought to be prize enough.
November 22, 2025 at 8:15 am |
And of course 11/22 is also the birth date of Benjamin Britten himself (in 1913). During my 29-year tenure as a member of the local chorus The Boston Cecilia, we sang the Hymn to Saint Cecilia several times (the director was a big Britten fan); it’s a fabulous piece, but fiendishly difficult to keep on pitch, and some of Auden’s text is impenetrably abstruse (to me, anyway).