A decade of thanks

Ten years ago this month, I took a deep breath, walked into McCosh 62 and began speaking to 31 undergraduates about the history of English. This was a trial by fire: I was a graduate student in linguistics at Harvard and had pretty much never taught anybody anything; I was not an expert on the English language; and Princeton was giving me a one-semester, quarter-time contract, which is about as low on the academic totem pole as it is possible to be here. The course in question was CLA/ENG 208: Origins and Nature of English Vocabulary and I remember well how Neal Jagtap '00 and Paul Deeringer '01 walked back with me to East Pyne one day after lecture, how we stood where the statue of John Witherspoon now stands, how they said to me, "It's a good class. Pity you won't ever have a proper job here." Well, this semester finds me teaching "Origins and Nature of English Vocabulary" for the seventh time. I have less hair now, but I also have a Ph.D., an earned knowledge of the subject and so many memories of so many great students, including Neal and Paul. That calls for thanks.

One of my early supporters was John Keaney, who retired in 2000 after 41 years on the faculty. In his final year, John - JJK to my JTK - chose to be a preceptor for CLA 208, an extraordinary act for someone who had tenure before I was born. Gruff but with a heart of gold, he was known for his forays into essentially unknown corners of Greek literature, his strong Boston accent (he was, I believe, the son of a gravedigger who had come over from Ireland) and his love of pizza, Rome and his family. John died on Easter Monday 2003, and I think of him often, especially in connection with the current flurry of activity around Firestone Library, whose collections - from the ancient lexica to the latest mysteries - he knew as intimately as anyone.

One of the things I stress in CLA 208 is the importance of looking at most things in the world - language, to be sure, but much else besides - from a perspective that is simultaneously synchronic and diachronic. In plain English: to know both how things are at a given point in time ("syn-chrony" is Greek for "with time") and why they have turned out this way ("dia-chrony" means "through time"). For example, it is a fact that the American Dialect Society last month announced that the "Word of the Year" for 2007 is "subprime." But at least as interesting as this synchronic observation about our language are the reasons why the word is on so many people's lips in the first place. (Arguably more interesting still is what Ben Bernanke is going to do about it. Predicting the future is something linguists leave to the economists.) Also a fact is that George W. Bush is President of the United States, but it would surely be a mistake simply to shrug one's shoulders and ignore why this is so. And, yes, here I am at Princeton, a decade on - and I just wouldn't be without John Keaney. Thanks, John.

Fortunately, no other great friend of mine associated with the University has died in these years. It seems wrong to give names of the living after mentioning John, but I hope that the few others I have space to thank recognize themselves in the following sentences. Thanks to an erstwhile residential college master for giving new meaning to the word "energetic." Thanks to a colleague with avuncular tendencies. Thanks to a former undergraduate in CLA 208 for giving me a book of Jewish jokes in Czech. Thanks to an administrative assistant in West College for her irrepressible good cheer. Thanks to a know-it-all in Firestone. Thanks to a once-graduate student who introduced me to a certain Chinese restaurant that sadly is no more.

During the past ten years, I have watched and listened to the language change - and not just the language - so that what was synchronic when I taught Neal and Paul is now part of history, part of the diachronic background of the speech of the members of the Class of 2011 I am teaching now. My father - TJK to my JTK and a man whose Latin is confined to a famous line of Vergil, one he regularly quotes: "Happy is the person who understands the causes of things" - is, remarkably, in his 50th year as a professor at another Ivy League institution. I can't see myself still teaching here in 2048, but I hope to last a few more decades. Maybe 41 years, like John Keaney? It'll be interesting to see what happens. Thanks, Princeton.

 

Joshua Katz is a professor in the department of Classics and a Forbes faculty adviser. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.