This reminds me of the time that Joshua Whatmough, who held his classes
over in Radcliffe Yard, was lecturing (not about Comparative Grammar, but
about how to shoot pigeons with a water pistol and molten pitch) about 20
minutes after class was supposed to be over, and a cleaning woman came into
the room with bucket and mop--we had to listen to anoher 20 minutes of
vituperation directed at the poor lady who was trying to get her job
done--and this on a Saturday at 12:30 p.m.! Whatmough was a little
Welshman, a great scholar, but one whose height impacted his sense of
self-importance. My wife worked at Harvard Purchasing Dept. while I was in
grad school, and she said that they were so terrified of him that everyone
would drop heads low on their desks when he walked into their office, and
they even filed the "Linguistics" accounts under "W" for "Whatmough."
>Academic trivia fascinate and make great names human. Sometime I will give
>you some Kaesemann anecdotes--or Bultmann ones.
Bitte, bitte! I do recall how the first pastor (in my experience, that is;
the congregation is much older, antedating the Civil War--in fact, the
first Missouri shots in the Civil War were shot across the front steps of
the church building of that time in downtown St. Louis) of my own St. Louis
congregation, W. Sherman Skinner, told of meeting Bultmann in Tuebingen and
embarrassing himself by saying to him, "Ach, Professor Doctor Bultmann, es
freut mich sehr! Sie haben ein so grosses Geruch!" "Geruch," for the
Deutschlosen, means "scent."
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/