In memoriam John Robert Ross (May 7, 1938 to May 13, 2025). The news of Haj’s death came in my morning e-mail on Wednesday 5/14, right next to a Bizarro cartoon with a cowboy joke / restaurant joke, turning on an absurd pun on ranch dressing that Haj (who was a walking library of jokes) would have appreciated, and so with a synchronicity that Haj would have delighted in.
J.R. Ross was an outsized figure in linguistics, whose ideas (beginning with his 1967 MIT dissertation, Constraints on Variables in Syntax) altered the field. Haj Ross was a literally outsized person physically, a large, blocky man (he really did play football for Yale as an undergraduate) with a big presence. And Haj, no surname needed, had an outsized personality — endlessly imaginative, enormously funny, astonishingly empathetic and gentle, “big and sparkly” (me on Facebook), with “an amazing facility for the intricacies of English” (John Beavers on FB) and “an innocent sense of wonder about language, poetry, and the world” (Susan Fischer on FB). And resolutely counter-cultural (often barefooted, and rarely standing on ceremony), also attuned to all the Zen-inflected frequencies on your radio dial.
He was a good friend of mine, and an inspiration to me, from 1963 on. So this posting is hard to write. I will collect myself and pick out some facts, some assortment of outrageous anecdotes, a small selection of his poetry and artwork, and even (since, like Haj, I’m hopelessly a linguist) a note about a neglected feature of his work on syntax that I think is important in the intellectual history of the field. I will do all that in another posting, I hope tomorrow.
Today I’ll start the way Haj often started his public presentations. With a joke, that Bizarro cartoon (remember the cartoon?). From which a Google AI Overview search then led me, goofily, into a strange dusty canyon of verse, Jim Ross’s self-published Pull Up a Chair: Cowboy Poetry. Truly, Haj would have loved that.
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