Archive for the ‘Awards’ Category
June 20, 2026
In the New Yorker‘s 6/15/26 issue, a “Talk of the Town” piece “The Boards: Like Willy Wonka” by Zach Helfand on the theatre director Michael Arden experiencing indoor skydiving at a facility in Queens (in preparation for his latest show, “The Lost Boys”, which includes actors in intricate flying sequences). Then:
In his acceptance speech for his first Tony, in 2023, Arden recounted being a bullied queer theatre kid in Texas, and then said, “All I can say is that now I’m a faggot with a Tony.” Post-flying, Arden said, “I was more nervous making that speech [than flying indoors]. That was terrifying.”
In Arden’s I’m a faggot with a Tony, I hear a mixture of urgent defiance and anxious fear that’s familiar terrain — I’m a pussy-boy in the American Academy — that I passed through first as a child.
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Posted in Awards, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Music, Theater | 2 Comments »
April 22, 2026
Two things: in my e-mail, the list of the members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the 2026 class, including two linguists and two scholars of LGBTQ+ matters (I might have missed others); then through the USPS, the information booklet for this June’s California direct primary elections, with its massive list of candidates for governor (61 of them).
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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Gender and sexuality, Language and politics, Linguists | Leave a Comment »
October 28, 2025
Yesterday on this blog, the posting “LSA news bulletin: awards” on (among other things)
Kira Hall — of the University of Colorado, Boulder — as the 5th recipient of the … Arnold Zwicky Award, intended to recognize LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community.
Now, some basic information about KH, from Wikipedia and from the University of Colorado website; I might add some further information about her in a while.
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Posted in Anthropology, Awards, Gender and sexuality, Linguists, Sociolinguistics | 1 Comment »
October 27, 2025
Today turned out to be the annual awards announcement day for the Linguistic Society of America. Two awards of special interest to readers of this blog, in e-mail from the LSA (both announcements edited, rearranged, and expanded here):
The Bloomfield Book Award Committee, recognizing a volume that makes an outstanding contribution of enduring value to our understanding of language and linguistics, congratulates George Aaron Broadwell — Aaron Broadwell, of the University of Florida, Gainesville — as an award finalist (there are two finalists) on his book The Timucua Language: A Text-Based Reference Grammar, published by University of Nebraska Press in 2024. The award is named after Leonard Bloomfield, author of the influential textbook Language (1933), one of the founding members of the LSA in 1924, and its president in 1935.
Join the Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics (COZIL) in congratulating Kira Hall — of the University of Colorado, Boulder — as the 5th recipient of the prestigious Arnold Zwicky Award, intended to recognize LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community. The award is named for Arnold Zwicky, the first openly LGBTQ+ president of the LSA.
So it’s LSA President’s Day (Bloomfield and me), and also LSA Pride Day (Aaron, Kira, and me).
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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Books, Gender and sexuality, Linguists, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »
June 10, 2025
Very briefly noted. In my e-mail today, Update No. 608 from the Linguistic Society of America, announcing the slate of candidates for its upcoming elections, with one nominee for vice-president / president-elect: the sociolinguist and creolist Tracey Weldon (University of South Carolina). A great pleasure for me, since TW’s time as a graduate student at Ohio State (culminating in her PhD in 1998) was my final time at Ohio State (I moved permanently from Columbus in 1998). A photo of TW in mid-speech:
A shot from the documentary Talking Black in America (2017), since expanded to a 5-part series
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Posted in Awards, Linguists, Ohio State, Race and ethnicity, Sociolinguistics | 2 Comments »
May 12, 2025
Just posted on, a fabricated award from Google Gives Back, and then an announcement from the Linguistic Society of America, seeking nominations for its actual awards, a list that now begins, in alphabetic order (so for once the last shall be first):
Nominations due on June 30, 2025:
— Arnold Zwicky Award: recognizing LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community.
— C.L. Baker Award: recognizing mid-career scholars in syntactic theory.
The description of the award (now in its fifth year) named after me has been slightly altered (to satisfy current law); but I continue to be moved that an award on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community was established in my name, and while I was still alive. My joking description of this honor is that I am now officially a Famous Faggot; in the circles I care about, that’s a great honor indeed.
I included the second award from the list because it has a special meaning for me: Lee Baker was my first PhD student, some 60 years ago: a sharp and thoughtful linguist, a remarkable teacher, and a good man, taken from us way too young.
Posted in Academic life, Awards, Gender and sexuality | Leave a Comment »
May 12, 2025
Junk and spam e-mail and blog comments continue to stream in, but the automated resources filtering these out for me (and leaving me with some considerable residue to judge by hand) have altered. I’m now getting versions of the Nigerian prince scam, in languages the filters don’t know what to do with (German, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic). And then, in my Junk mailbox (where the filters put stuff they judge might be junk, but leave the final judgment to me) on the morning of 5/6, this fabrication:
(This is a photograph of the mailing, so you can’t link to the Google.org site on it)
There’s a lot of real stuff alluded to in this mailing: the Google address is correct; there is a Google.org charitable arm of Google; that’s a passable reproduction of the Google.org logo; Google.com does give awards (the Google Cloud Partner Awards); “Google Gives Back” was the title of one of Google’s charitable efforts (though the name doesn’t seem to be used any more); and Sundar Pichai is indeed the CEO of Google.com. Some details follow below. But all of this anyone could have looked up. In any case, it smells bad, and the current filters picked up on that, I’m not entirely sure how.
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Posted in AI, Awards, Technology | Leave a Comment »
April 24, 2025
On Facebook yesterday, starting with a message from Andrew Garrett (the Berkeley linguist):
— AG: Couldn’t be happier for Leslie Kurke [interdisciplinary scholar of antiquity at the University of California, Berkeley] …, one of the new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in great company! [among them, CNN newsanchor Anderson Cooper; filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer Ava DuVernay; actor, producer, and humanitarian Danny Glover]
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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Linguists, Stanford | 3 Comments »
April 12, 2025
… which will plug into two topics being developed in my posting queue (which is totally unmanageable in the face of recent events in my life and in the world): rich people, and the death in January of the Princeton philosopher Paul Benacerraf (who was my senior-year adviser in mathematics). I will have a lot more to say about both of these topics in future postings, but today I’ll just give you the zinger.
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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Mathematics, My life, Philosophy, Princeton, Science, Stories, Teaching, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »
January 11, 2025
I guess because of the success of the 2024 movie A Complete Unknown (about Bob Dylan’s early career), the video of the crowning piece of the Dylan Nobel Prize ceremony popped up on Facebook recently: Patti Smith performing Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” as part of her accepting the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature on Dylan’s behalf. I post this because the performance is heart-breakingly wonderful (like many viewers, I was moved to tears), and because I want to celebrate Patti Smith, honor Bob Dylan and his remarkable poetry, and take delight in the fact that they’re still shining (well, we’re a generation — Dylan a bit younger than me and a bit older than my guy Jacques, Smith 6 years younger than me, but still 78, not a kid any more).
I’ll start at the pinnacle — Patti in Stockholm — and then fill in some bits of the background.
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Posted in Age, Awards, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Photography, Poetry, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
