Under the header “Howdy” (a folksy salutation I rarely encounter), this e-mail from 3/4 (somewhat edited):
I was in your syntax class at Stanford in the late 80s …
Recently had a colleague [who] said he was basing [a] clitics and circumclitics paper on your theories! So, thought I’d say hello and thank you for not flunking me.
Now, I get an unbelievable amount of ill-intentioned mail from trollers, spammers, and seekers of commercial deals; now that these annoying entities have access to impressive AI programs, their junk e-mail regularly makes reference to details of my published work and is generally pretty sophisticated in its attempt to gain my confidence. That “Howdy” really was a red flag; also, although Howdy Boy wouldn’t have been the first former student to thank me for not flunking him, it’s a rare event, and might just have been a clever stroke to catch my attention.
On the other hand, his colleague’s paper was said to be about the language Miluk (a language I don’t recall having heard of before; it’s an extinct Coosan language of Oregon), and his e-name was miluk — two things lending some verisimilitude to him. And then his signature was
Troy Anderson, ‘89/‘90
which would put him at Stanford when I taught my really big Intermediate Syntax course, Linguistics 121, in winter quarter 1989 (more on this course in an appendix to this posting; but it’s relevant here that enrollment in the course was unexpectedly gigantic, requiring the last-minute hiring of a raft of additional grading assistants, who I then had to co-ordinate and manage, and making my memory of individual students quite hazy). But then “Troy Anderson” is the sort of everyday name that trollers and spammers make up.
Alas, my net experience includes astonishingly inventive malicious trollers, whose only purpose is to demonstrate their cleverness by deceiving otherwise intelligent people and wasting their time; and, a few months back, being disastrously defrauded by people who did a remarkable job of creating detailed counterfeits of a series of commercial websites. So I’m really really cautious. (Yes, this is a truly grotesque way to have to live.)
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