Word: whatmough
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Many of his "outrageous opinions" have eventually changed Harvard for the better, and it is therefore fortunate that Cambridge life has never mellowed Joshua Whatmough. Shortly after he arrived, he stirred up protests against the management of the University Library that culminated in a reorganization of Widener's system. At his irrepressible insistence, Harvard's diffuse studies of language were forged into a vigorous Department of Comparative Philology (the name became "Department of Linguistics" in 1951 to conform to current usage). His relentless emphasis on statistical method in the analysis of language has enabled this department to pioneer...
...observe the forms of his eccentricity one might listen to him lecture in Linguistics 100 ("Language"), impressively described in the catalogue of courses as dealing with such topics as the "Theory of Communication," "Language and the Nature of Man," "Language and Literature," and so forth. Actually, when Professor Whatmough lectures in Linguistics 100, he dispenses with these problems in thirty minutes. The rest of the hour gives him a chance to hold forth on everything that he feels needs speaking out against. He does this in the most elegantly precise English to be heard in Cambridge and often illustrates...
...Perhaps Whatmough is able to carry off the performance so beautifully because he is English; the English, after all, are a nation of eccentrics. Whatmough, himself is a Lancashire man, from the north country where his own name is sometimes pronounced "Whatmuff." (Whatmough can be most engaging on the subject of his unusual name. It comes from two old words meaning "brother-in-law of Walter" and a few years back was used as an example of silly British names by a writer in the New Yorker who made a sentence out of it: "What mo' could...
...pointless to discuss the Department of Linguistics separate from Joshua Whatmough--the two have been together so long that one cannot imagine them apart. By 1941, Whatmough had coordinated linguistic studies so well that the creation of the department was feasible. At that time he, himself, did all the necessary typing and paperwork; his total subsidy was fifteen dollars for postage. Today the Department of Linguistics has its own offices and secretaries and a small but growing number of undergraduate concentrators...
This June, Whatmough will retire as chairman of the department. "I have no feelings of resistance about giving up the chairmanship," he muses. "The chances are I've held the reins long enough--perhaps to long." He admits that the job has been a great burden, if only because of the paperwork involved. "You know, all this paperwork nowadays is a result of the war. Some of our deans got to know the ways the army and navy did things, and they've introduced them here...