Archive for the ‘Academic life’ Category

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Vacations

April 1, 2025

[I wrote this while watching Cory Booker speak on the floor of the US Senate for a record of over 25 hours straight, passionately speaking against the wickedness of the president and his sidekick and in favor of (among other things) diversity, equity, and inclusion; calling repeatedly on my hero John Lewis; and cleansing the nastiness of the previous record-holder, Strom Thurmond, who was filibustering against the Voting Rights Act of 1957. I wept, I cheered, I was moved to hope, at least for a few moments.]

Two triggers for this posting:

— the Zippy strip for 9/30 (so, something close to hot news) in which Zippy and Zerbina reminisce about their fabulous vacation at the Diet of Worms in 1521 (yes, Martin Luther is involved)

— 2022 e-mail from my old friend and linguistics colleague Elizabeth Closs Traugott (who’s a year older than I am but in vastly better shape), about a trip for pleasure she was about to take to (the) Pinnacles, south of here, which reminded me of a similar trip my guy Jacques made years ago. Which then took me to a vacation J and I took together. (Yes, this topic has been simmering on my desktop for three years; I have a prodigious backlog.)

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Posted in Academic life, Art, German, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Sucking the life out of the state

January 28, 2025

Returning to a very old topic on this blog, making small advances on some outstanding puzzles. It starts with my 6/8/11 posting (yes, 14 years ago) “Parasites and the body politic”, about

my dismayed reaction to recent political assaults on teachers (and, more generally, public employees) as drains on the economy, selfishly demanding decent wages and benefits while being “unproductive”, producing nothing of significance. Lots of things are going on at once here — contempt for the working classes and for service workers like maids, cooks, gardeners, and janitors (and, yes, teachers); classic American anti-intellectualism (cue Richard Hofstadter); marketplace valuation of people’s worth; and more — but parallel attitudes surface in the way many people view academics, so it hits close to home for me.

Then the anecdote. Some years ago I was at some large public function involving people of money and substance and, wine glass in hand, struck up a conversation with another attendee. This guy plunged right in by asking me what I do [for a living]. (In many cultures, the leading question would be some version of “Where are you from?”, meaning “Who are your people?”, but in ours it has to do with occupation. All such questions are designed to position a stranger socially.)

I said I was a university professor, and, without waiting to identify himself occupationally, he said

Artists and scholars are parasites on the body politic. [call this State Suckers, SS for short]

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Posted in Academic life, Formulaic language, Idioms, Insults, Language and politics, My life, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »

Luminous birthdays

January 26, 2025

First the depths of bleak mid-winter, in the third week of January, then a string of luminous birthdays in the last week, to bring the promise of a rising spring.

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Posted in Academic life, Anthropology, Events and occasions, Linguists, Lives, Music, Poetry | 5 Comments »

The sting in the tail

November 15, 2024

Coming to the Stanford Humanities Center on November 18 at 4:00 p.m., the 2024 Marta Sutton Weeks Lecture, “Caravaggio’s Americas” by the poet and scholar Edgar Garcia of the University of Chicago; the announcement:

This talk relocates the where and when of the baroque to the sixteenth-century Americas, arguing that the anxieties of eroded sovereignty amidst legal heterogeneity that gave rise to the baroque began not in Counter-Reformation responses to Protestantism but earlier in encounters with the legal and cultural others of the indigenous Americas. In this account, the spirit of the Counter Reformation precedes the Reformation and is, in its expression as the baroque, inescapably entangled with Indigenous cultures and polities of the Americas. In turn, this view of the baroque from the Americas helps to recast, interpret, and even re-visualize the works of the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs Caravaggio.

Dense with the abstract vocabulary of sociocultural analysis and cultural and literary history — it makes actual claims about the sources of the baroque / Baroque style in the Western arts, but it might take you some work to figure out what they are — the announcement devolves into a vividly earthy thumbnail characterization of Caravaggio as “the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs”. A sting in the tail. [Here we laugh and applaud.]

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Posted in Academic life, Art, Events, History, Language and culture, Literature, Stanford | Leave a Comment »

Goodbye, Jim

October 23, 2024

Jim Martin, a friend for 66 years, died on 10/21, at home in Kalua-Kona HI, with his wife of 43 years, Deb (Deborah) Hayes, and his brother Ross Martin to see him off as he succumbed finally to kidney disease. Jim — James Littell Martin III, but he was Jim to everyone, always — was 84 (born 8/7/1940, just one month before me, 9/6/1940, so on August 7th he regularly twitted me wryly on being my senior). The eldest of the five children of James L. Martin Jr. and his wife Helene, of Tulsa OK, Jim was one of my roommates at Princeton — we were in the class of 1962 — where he graduated with a major in biology. And went on to jobs in California, Texas, and Colorado before retiring to Hawaii.

I’ll provide further standard information about Jim’s life in a little while. But first some words from Deb and from me about his character and nature, as explanation for why we so lament his death.

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Posted in Academic life, Biology, Death notices, My life, Personal life, Princeton, Technology | 1 Comment »

The 2025 Arnold Zwicky Award

October 13, 2024

It is my annual November pleasure to discourse some on the just-revealed winner of the AZ Award from the Linguistic Society of America; the minimal announcement from the LSA:

This award … is intended to recognize the contributions of LGBTQ+ scholars in linguistics and is named for Arnold Zwicky, the first LGBTQ+ president of the LSA.

Join the Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics in congratulating Robert J. Podesva on receiving this prestigious award! A Stanford Associate Professor, he researches phonetic variation and identity while actively mentoring LGBTQ+ students to promote inclusivity in academia.

Rob is the fourth awardee — preceded by Kirby Conrod for 2022, Rusty Barrett for 2023, and Lal Zimman for 2024 — and will be officially feted at the LSA’s annual meetings in January. I always provide some encomium material for the awardees on this blog, but this year is special, because Rob is an old friend; a former student of mine (his PhD dissertation committee was Penny Eckert (chair), John Rickford, and me, which is about as socioculturally diverse a committee of three as you could concoct in the academic world); and a valued colleague of mine at Stanford. So there are four reasons for me to write this posting, and I will take some liberties in digressing into personal remarks along the way.

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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Linguists, Sociolinguistics, Stanford, Style and register | Leave a Comment »

Arctic education

September 21, 2024

I was delighted to discover yesterday that there is an Arctic University of Norway (UiT), with 11 study sites / campuses across northern Norway and administrative offices in Tromsø. As someone whose friendship network embraces the University of Alaska at Fairbanks (plus my collaborator Jerry Sadock, who is a scholar of, among other things, Greenlandic Eskimo), I’m pleased to see teaching and research flourishing in the far north.

Now consider this map of the continental Scandinavian countries (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland) and nearby lands — and marvel at just how far north Tromsø (marked on the map) is:


I have friends, students, and colleagues who have grown up in, studied in, or taught in most of the Scandinavian cities named on this map, but the farthest north of these cities is Oulu in Finland (Don Steiny loved his time there), which is way south of Tromsø (and Murmansk in Russia); meanwhile, on the Linguistic Typology mailing list, Dave Sayers often writes about the pleasures of his home university, Jyväskylä, in Finland, which is away from the madding crowds, but far south even of Oulu, in the Finnish central lake district, north of Tampere on this map

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Posted in Academic life, Geography | 2 Comments »

Lament for Manfred

August 4, 2024

Ich weiß wohl, was soll es bedeutenDass ich so traurig bin

An anguish of old age is living immersed in death — of family, friends, loves, colleagues, mentors and models, students, people who have entertained, enriched, and illuminated you — while laboring just to get from day to day yourself. I have failed to memorialize many of the departed, I cannot cope any more, and I am ashamed of all of that. And now comes the death of Manfred Bierwisch, not exactly a surprise, since he was a full decade older than me, but then he was one of the few who should have been granted a life forever. And with a special role in my life.

Martin Haspelmath on Facebook this morning:

RIP Manfred Bierwisch (1930-2024, in the middle of the picture).


(MH:) The picture shows [MB] with his close friends Paul Kiparsky and Dieter Wunderlich (taken from Kiparsky’s 2023 memoir in the [Annual Review of Linguistics])

He was the GDR’s most prominent linguist, but he made no compromises with the regime. When some people were doing “Marxist linguistics” because it was good for their careers, he kept pursuing “structural linguistics”. Unlike some of his friends from the 1950s (e.g. Heinz Vater and Ewald Lang), he did not try to leave for the freer West Germany, but he stayed in the East. In 2005, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Leipzig University, where he had studied in the 1950s (and where he was jailed for 10 months for possession of illegal writings).

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Posted in Academic life, Death notices, German, Linguists, My life | Leave a Comment »

Dr. Cuba, I presume?

July 4, 2024

From Ernesto Cuba on Facebook today, reporting on:

Féminas Speaking Up: Three Papers on Feminine Transgender Identities, Gender Identity Activism, and Language Reform in Lima, Peru (PhD dissertation in Linguistics, Graduate Center, CUNY, 2024)

with this happy note:

Fresh out of the oven! My doctoral thesis on identities, culture and trans linguistic reform in Lima, Peru is now available for download. The thesis is written entirely in English to allow for a more global reading. However, since the work was done with Hispanic-speaking women, the original quotes in Spanish have been maintained. One of the three articles that make up thesis will be published in September this year and the other two are looking for a home in academic journals these months.

You can access the thesis by clicking here.

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Posted in Academic life, Gender and sexuality, Spanish | Leave a Comment »

Steven Dashiell

May 28, 2024

From e-mail on 5/5 from interdisciplinary sociologist Steven Dashiell, who pursues research on discourse in male-dominated subcultures (looking at military men, gamers, barbershop patrons, gay men, and more) and has built on a posting of mine on the trope of the pizza boy in gay pornography in a recent essay of his own:

I love your blog.  I was introduced to the study of language in my doctoral program [at the University of Maryland Baltimore County], and I grew from a “social inequality sociologist” to a “sociologist of language who studies male-dominated spaces to understand inequality”.  It’s been a wild ride, because the study of language goes in so many different directions.  I’m glad to have some mentors who help me …

It’s a good day when admirable people like SD write me to tell me they love my blog — in this case, SD likes it because it’s linguistics linguistics linguistics and because it’s gay gay gay, and both of these things are important to SD. But now I’ve had some time to get acquainted with SD’s life history (that being one of my things) and the way he arranges his life now (that being another one of my things), and I can do a lightning survey of this landscape, to make a few general points. One of these being the extraordinary variety of homomasculinities.

Four cases: my own complex story, presented at great length in postings on this blog; Richard Vytniorgu’s story (one significant theme of which is his being a bottom, fem, and submissive — plus British and academic-literary); Troy Anderson’s story (whose life themes include his being a guy guy, a gigantic jock bear into leather, a corporate executive, and a Native American), and now Steven Dashiell’s story (another jock bear (not into leather), an academic, and Black). And this just scratches the surface; I’ve told other even more disparate stories.  Take these stories to heart if you’re inclined to spout generalizations about what gay men are like (or worse, about what men are like).

But now to SD.

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Posted in Academic life, Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Race and ethnicity, Teaching | Leave a Comment »

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