Death to the natural man

I dreamt that Bob Levine, one of my old linguistics professors, was in my study looking at my bookshelves. He took down a thick folio-size volume that said Language Log on the cover. In real life, that's the name of a blog, but in the dream I understood that it was a wide-ranging introductory linguistics textbook.

"I see you've got one of mine here," Bob said.

"Oh, did you contribute to that?" I said. "Some of the syntax chapters? I'll bet David Dowty wrote something for it, too." I turned to the very long list of authors at the front of the book and began scanning it for Dr. Dowty's name. It didn't seem to be there.

Bob turned his attention to a picture on the wall, which was a Ten of Swords card, enlarged and framed.

"Interesting choice," he said. "What does it mean?"

"Death to the natural man."

"In the Shakespearean sense? Or no, St. Paul. Crucifixion is the more usual symbol, you know."

"Those are crosses."

"Ten of them?"

"Ten is a cross, too. And yes, some of us require a bit of overkill."

With that I woke up.

⁂

It may seem strange to be discussing St. Paul with a Jew, but Bob Levine has read everything and catches every allusion -- or at least I've never been able to slip one past him. (Though in this dream, I guess I did. He should have known I was thinking more of King Benjamin than Paul.) His "Shakespearean" comment was a reference to a conversation we had more than 20 years ago. I had told him I was considering graduate work in head-driven phrase structure grammar.

"I think you should go for it. You're a natural."

"Not in the Shakespearean sense I hope."

"Like Touchstone? You know we don't believe in blank slates around here."

In Shakespeare, the noun natural refers to a fool or idiot, and one so described is Touchstone in As You Like It. A literal touchstone is a slate, though, and "blank slate" was something of a buzzword in the linguistics world at that time (see for example Steven Pinker's 2002 book with that title). Interestingly, Touchstone is described as having been sent by Fortune, or Tyche -- "Hath not Fortune sent in this fool to cut off the argument?"

The last time Bob and I corresponded was in 2015, when we were discussing a particular syntactic structure that is so hard to deal with theoretically that its official name is the Big Mess. One of Bob's quirks is that the example sentences he creates to illustrate syntactic points always feature gender-neutral names like Robin and Leslie, as well as references to Ostrogoths or Visigoths. Thus it was that our email exchange focused on these three sentences:

This is so difficult a question that it has never been answered.

Terry is as skilled an oboist as Robin.

How eloquent an Ostrogoth Leslie is!

I mention this only because both Terry (the giant Irishman) and Robin (the Hobgoblin) have been in the sync stream.

Also possibly relevant is another dream with Bob Levine in it: 2020's "Black dogs and Reubens."

When I googled Robert Levine to see what he was up to these days, the first results were about Mary Tyler Moore's husband. Possibly relevant in connection with Weezer's "Buddy Holly."