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.
Archive for the ‘Ohio State’ Category
Tomorrow x 4
November 21, 2025CV time at Stanford
August 15, 2025Ever 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:
The LSA slate
June 10, 2025Very 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
The Vouch Joke
May 22, 2025(Warning: this will end up with a naked man on all fours, in a display that’s meant to be sexual rather than jocular)
I had occasion this morning to vouch for Scott Schwenter (Ohio State professor of Hispanic linguistics) having gotten a PhD from Stanford, and in doing so alluded to the Vouch Joke, which I heard many years ago from Paul Benacerraf (Princeton professor of philosophy, especially the philosophy of mathematics, and the director of my senior thesis in mathematics back in 1962). PB told the joke as Alonzo Church’s only known joke (AC, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Princeton, was another of my professors and was on my thesis committee); relevant to PB’s telling of the joke, AC was one of the most earnest, least playful people I have ever known (but he was good-hearted and not without his quirks, one of which was a passion for murder mysteries, another a meticulous enthusiasm for atlases and gazetteers), and he was an American WASP Christian, a lifelong Presbyterian, while PB was a Jew, a genuinely cosmopolitan one, with an early life in Paris and Caracas before establishing firm roots in New Jersey as a teenager.
All this religious stuff is important because the joke as AC told it was thoroughly whitebread. It has two main characters (both male): the vouchee, the subject of the joke, who is interrogated by some kind of authority about his status (“Who are you?” and “Why are you here?”); and the voucher, the person the subject offers as someone who can vouch for him — two characters that AC gave WASP names to (an ordinary name like Harold for the subject and Richard for the voucher). In telling me the joke, PB prefaced it by giving the names AC used, but then actually performed the joke as a Jewish joke, in which the subject was called something like Abie and the voucher was named Moishe.
“Moishe will vouch for me; get Moishe!”
In my opinion, this makes it funnier — as a general principle, Jewish jokes are funnier than other jokes, because Jewish jokes originate as stories told by Jews for other Jews, and they are affectionate or self-deprecating or instructive or some combination of these, neither aggressive nor contemptuous — and even more delightful as a kind of commentary on AC’s whitebread version.