NIGHT SWEATS

I recall reading, a long time ago, that English has an unusually large number of words, the consequence as I recall of its being the fusion of a Germanic language – Anglo-Saxon – and a Latinate language – early French. This, I believe, was offered as the explanation for the richness of Shakespeare’s language. This fact about English contributes to the difficulty of the online word game Wordle, hosted by the New York Times. For those who are unfamiliar with the game, you are required to guess a five letter word in six tries (proper names, plurals, and gerunds not permitted.) If your guess contains a letter in the hidden word the letter lights up in orange and if it is in the correct place as well it lights up in green.

 

To see why the richness of English poses problems, suppose you have somehow guessed the word “round” on your second try, and suppose further that the o, the u, the n, and the d all light up green. You might think you were on your way to an easy win but there are actually seven remaining words possible and only four guesses left. The seven words are bound, found, hound, mound, pound, sound, and wound. What to do? Well, as your third try you can type in “swamp.” That contains four of the possible letters. If one of them lights up you can solve the puzzle in four tries – a pretty good result. If none of them light up try “beach.” Now you can solve the puzzle on the fifth try. This avoids the condescending “whew,” which the WORDLE bot offers as a consolation for those solving the puzzle in six tries.

 

Last night, I found myself at 3 AM half awake and thinking obsessively of all five letter words that end in “irth.” Since I was doing all this in my head I included five and six letter words that sounded as though they were spelled this way. So I came up with birth, dearth, earth, girth, mirth, and worth.  Still unable to go back to sleep, I started thinking up book titles using these words. Here are some of what I came up with:

 

The Birth of Earth: a pictorial history of the origin of the solar system for readers of all ages.

The Birth of Mirth: the development of humor in ancient Greece.

The Mirth of Birth: jokes told by doulas.

The Mirth of Girth: fat jokes from old vaudeville routines

The Birth of Dearth: socioeconomic causes of poverty.

The Dearth of Birth: low fertility rates in Europe and China.

The Worth of Girth: obesity as an emblem of social status in premodern societies.

 

At this point I fell back into a fretful sleep.

 

FINAL LECTURE

If you are interested, I will give my final zoom lecture at 2 PM this afternoon. Here is the link.

DOWN MEMORY LANE

Yesterday, thanks to the miracle of zoom, I was able to attend the celebration at the University of Massachusetts commemorating the 50^th anniversary of a program I started there in 1972 – 73, called Social Thought and Political Economy, or as the UMass computer immediately rendered it, STPEC.  STPEC began as an edgy left-wing version of the Social Studies program I headed up at Harvard in 1960 – 61 during its first year and my last year as an instructor there. Over the past half-century, close to 2000 young men and women have majored in STPEC at UMass, and it is a first rate program now emphasizing community activism as well as campus study.

 

I particularly wanted to appear at the commemoration of the program because I wanted to tell the folks there that in one particular respect it is quite unlike the other undergraduate interdisciplinary programs with which I have been familiar, such as the Contemporary Civilization program at Columbia, which began in 1919 and continues to this day, or the old Hutchins University of Chicago program, in the last iteration of which I taught during my three years there. At Columbia, Chicago, and Harvard, faculty got together and decided what students ought to study and then offered it to them to take it or leave it. But at UMass, something rather different happened.

 

My original idea was to have students take courses drawn from a variety of departments and then top that off with a senior year seminar jointly taught by two professors from different departments (thus institutionalizing the interdisciplinary character of the program.) After several years, there were enough juniors about to be seniors in the program, so I got together with William Connolly, a bright professor in the political science department, and the next year, in 1976- 77, we taught the first STPEC senior seminar.

 

Bill and I were having a great time teaching a very demanding senior seminar when some students came to see me in my office. They were juniors in the program who had been talking to the seniors in our seminar and they told me that they did not think the courses they had been taking prepared them for that kind of demanding senior capstone course. Was there something I could do to prepare them better for the senior seminar? Well, I thought about it for a bit and went to the Provost to ask for a little bit of money. I used it to buy the time of a hotshot young political science professor at Mount Holyoke College named Tracey Strong, who was delighted to have the opportunity to teach a course on the classic texts of social theory.

 

Tracey devised a very demanding course and after he started teaching it, some students came to see me. They were sophomores in the STPEC program and they had been talking to the juniors taking the junior seminar. They did not think that their introductory level courses in various departments had prepared them for that kind of seminar and they wanted to know whether there was something I could do about it. After thinking about it for a bit I created a new course in the Philosophy Department at the introductory level called Introduction to Social Philosophy.

 

This was the only instance I had ever seen in which the curricular structure of an undergraduate program was determined not by what the faculty thought the students should study, but by what the students told the faculty they needed and wanted.

 

In 1980, my first wife, who was a professor in the UMass English department, was offered a professorship at MIT so we moved from Northampton to Belmont and I started commuting back three days a week to UMass. Now, as I am sure many of you know, being a senior professor at a university is not a very demanding job so I had no trouble satisfying my departmental requirements on parts of three days a week but I could not very well run the STPEC program that way, so I looked around for someone to take over from me. I found a wonderful young woman in the German department named Sara Lennox who was about to get tenure and was very excited by the thought of running this program rather than teaching German for the rest of her life. Sara, who was of course at the celebration meeting, then ran STPEC for 31 years, preserving the tradition of student input into the shape and direction of the program and making it an enormous success.

 

As I told those who were gathered at yesterday’s meeting, like all people of my age I am happy to take credit for everything I did half a century ago if it has turned out well, as in this case it clearly has. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to see what has become of one of my favorite bits of academic creativity and I am enormously grateful to whoever invented zoom for the opportunity.

STARTING

 ok.  I gave $380, which matches the $190 in donations.   Keep them coming.

OFF TO THE RACES

 The first hundred is in! Keep them coming.

TIME TO GRAB YOUR CHECKBOOKS

Forty-nine years ago, shortly after I joined the UMass faculty, Prentice Hall asked me to write a philosophy textbook. My wife at the time, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, had won an AAUW fellowship to take a year off from teaching in order to write a book on Edith Wharton. Although she worked very hard that year, it was clear that she needed another semester to finish the manuscript. I agreed to do the textbook for Prentice Hall if they would give me an advance large enough to permit her to take the semester off from teaching, and they agreed. One year later I turned in the manuscript to Prentice Hall, and in 1976 the book came out. (Her book, A Feast of Words, was a brilliant success and has become a classic study of Wharton's fictions.)   My textbook has now gone into  eleven editions and still is being used somewhere in American higher education. I recently got a six month royalty check for $2603, and I think it is time to do another matching fund exercise for the benefit of the DLCC.

 

We are at a critical moment in the evolution and/or demise of democracy in America. The Dobbs decision, the endless series of mass shootings and racially encoded murders, the descent of the Republican Party into a cult, all suggest that what passes for democracy in America is coming apart. Simultaneously, there seem to be spontaneous mobilizations all over the country of men and women, some quite young, who are eager to use their votes to counter the ugliness of contemporary American life.

 

For all the reasons that have been discussed on this blog site in the past, the most effective way for us to make our little bits of money count is to funnel them into local and state level elections.

 

Therefore, once again, I am announcing a matching fund campaign for the DLCC. I will match each dollar that you contribute to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee with two dollars of my own, up to a total of $1000 from you matched with $2000 from me.  That is just a drop in the bucket, of course, but it is not nothing and it is the most we can do.

Let me know what you donate and I will match at 2 for 1.

LATEST TECH WORD

I am told that if you can sign into any zoom account you should be okay.  I have no idea what that means but give it a try.  The lectures are being recorded so maybe I will be able to post them in some form. It was not this complicated when I started teaching in 1955😇