I was reading a recent interview with Noam Chomsky, best known perhaps as the “Father of Modern Linguistics,” [see Tangent 2 below], although his championing of left wing causes has brought him well-deserved attention. At 88, the guy is still as sharp as a whip, so the interviewer asked what the secret to his unbounded energy and enthusiasm was. “It’s like riding a bicycle,” he said. “As long as you don’t stop, you won’t fall off.” Thanks Noam, I’m working on it. More recently, under the click-bait headline “Donald Trump Is the Bizarro Noam Chomsky,” the New Republic compared the two in what struck me as, excuse me, a bizarre article.

Tangent No. 1: English bizarre (“strikingly unconventional and far-fetched in style or appearance,” presumably what the NR writer meant) comes from Spanish bizzaro (“brave”), which in turn comes from Euskara, aka Basque bizar, meaning “beard.” It’s about the only word in English to come from Basque, a “language isolate,” and the only remaining pre-Indo-European tongue in Western Europe. Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1767-1835, the younger brother of the guy for whom our county is named figured that out.

The New Republic writer was riffing on that weird interview Trump did with Bill O’Reilly, the part when they were discussing Trump’s BFF Vladimir Putin: “He’s a killer though, Putin’s a killer,” objected O’Reilly. “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?” DJT fired back. So the New Republic guy made the connection, saying that Trump and Chomsky agree that “the U.S. often does terrible things for amoral reasons. The crucial difference is that Chomsky wants the U.S. to stop behaving in this manner, while Trump promises to be more effective in his brutality and looting. Trump, then, is a kind of Bizarro Chomsky — one bereft of a conscience, of any sense of right and wrong.”

I disagree with the Trump-Chomsky set-up, and I’d be interested in readers’ reactions to the above. IMHO, our president has a fine sense of right and wrong. He understands morality as well as the most principled of us. But that’s where it ends, understanding and action being poles apart. I don’t believe the guy is a sociopath. Needy and narcissistic to a fault, yes, but quite aware of good and evil. It’s just that he’s weak. If he were a stronger character, instead of Steve Bannon’s puppet, the next four years might have been refreshing, instead of scary as all get-up.

(Apologies to the artist, I can’t find the source for this love-in.)

(To remind you, in case you’ve forgotten, Bannon is a genuinely scary guy who wants nothing less than a revolution. He told an interviewer in 2013, “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Last year, speaking of Breitbart—he was executive chairman—he said, “We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class.”)

Oh, enough of that. I started this off wanting to write about Noam Chomsky, who can be pretty hard-nosed himself. For instance, he’s had a running philosophical battle with fellow linguist Dan Everett since Everett, who spent many years living with a remote tribe in the Brazilian Amazon (he went as a missionary, but got converted to atheism after embracing the live-for-the-day philosophy of his putative converts), questioned one of Chomsky’s basic linguistic tenets. I detailed it in a recent column for the Journal here. Apparently it touched a nerve — Chomsky told a Brazilian reported that his erstwhile acolyte was a charlatan. In academese, that’s calling the guy a liar.

Linguist and recovering missionary Dan Everett (right). Kaabohoá, a Pirahã friend, left. (Martin Schoeller, used with permission)

Which takes a bit of the shine off Chomsky’s linguistic aura, but there’s a lot of shiny stuff left, as I wrote here. I’ll always think of Noam Chomsky, right or wrong, as the “Copernicus of Linguistics.” (Spoiler: self-promotion follows.) I’ll be discussing Chomsky’s “Universal Grammar” (and the origin of language, why English is so weird compared to its Indo-European siblings, and much more) in my OLLI class (The Lore and Lure of Language) at the Humboldt Bay Aquatic Center on March 8 at 6 p.m. Call 826-5880 to register.

Tangent 2: “But who is the actual father of linguistics?” you ask. That would be Sir William Jones, jurist during the Raj (British rule in India), who in 1786 kick-started the whole science when he gave a talk to the Asiatic Club in Calcutta showing that Latin, Greek and Sanskrit came from a common root.

Tangent 3: Wait! There’s more! I gave my first book signing at Kepler’s Bookstore in Menlo Park yea many years ago. For three hours I sat with a stack of my newly-published book (Everyday Wonders) on the table in front of me. My one and only attendee was a six-year old kid. He wasn’t buying. Please don’t let this happen to me again! I’ll be at Eureka Books this coming Arts Alive, March 4, 6-8 p.m., with my latest concoction, Revenge of Field Notes, a whole stack of them. (You don’t have to buy anything, just say hi, ok?)

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Barry Evans gave the best years of his life to civil engineering, and what thanks did he get? In his dotage, he travels, kayaks, meditates and writes for the Journal and the Humboldt Historian. He sucks at 8 Ball. Buy his Field Notes anthologies at any local bookstore. Please.