Karen complained about having to make collages in English class in tenth grade, and other insults to her intelligence that she endured in high school. Steven: "You turned out all right in spite of that." Karen: "But for years I was filled with rage. I had nightmares about not graduating from high school because I had to fulfill the kindergarten requirement."

I asked them (as I've been asking everyone) what happened to the revolutionary* fervor that animated so many Texans in the 1890s (how can a political tradition vanish without a trace?), & Matthew mentioned the discovery of oil. That's very plausible!

*I didn't know what word to use here. "Populist" has a debased meaning, except as a proper adjective, and Goodwyn (rather perversely) redefines "Progressive" to mean "reactionary." Maybe I should call it "socialist," as their enemies did. (But they can't have objected, since they allied themselves with Eugene Debs!)

In spite of its jargon-filled introduction, The Populist Moment is very good.

I wish I could say the same of Georges Mounin's Storia della Linguistica. In spite of the title, and the publisher (Feltrinelli), this is not a book for the general reader. Mounin seems to think that the point of his book is to suggest directions for future research, and he's pathetically eager to prove that he's done his reading:

Si facevano ricerche qua e là su molti problemi dello stesso tipo: per esempio, quello dell'a indoeuropea, dove appare chiaro l'immobilismo rappresentato dalla teoria schleicheriana dell'antichità del sanscrito. Lo stesso Curtius aveva proposto un principio di soluzione, scartato da Schleicher. Esattamente in questo clima si debbono situare gli articoli di Brugmann e di Osthoff sulle sonore; il primo, nella prefazione, si riferisce, con elogi, del resto, a Scherer e a Leskien.

It sounds like a parody, but it's not. Does it have to be that boring? I don't think so. The first sentence refers to Sanskrit's tendency to turn every vowel into "a," but does he explain that? Of course not! "Then would be some stooping, and I choose never to stoop." He's constantly alluding to things that sound interesting, but he never explains.

I was quite excited about this book at first, because it has a long section on the ancients, the premise being that writing systems tell us a great deal about how people thought about language. It sounds like an obvious point, but so often people date the birth of linguistics to the nineteenth century, or worse, to Saussure. So I was delighted to see an acknowledgement that people had ideas on the subject thousands of years ago, even though they failed to put their ideas into scholarly format. But even this part of the book was a disappointment, because it wasn't illustrated.

Enough. If you know a good book on the history of linguistics, tell me about it.