February 11, 2005
Lightfoot
In this morning's news:
The National Science Foundation has named eminent linguistic scientist and veteran administrator David W. Lightfoot to head its Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. He will take office on June 1.
Lightfoot, Dean of the Graduate School for Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University and a professor in its Department of Linguistics, will oversee NSF’s $197 million annual investments in fields such as anthropology, psychology, cognitive studies, political science, linguistics, risk management and economics.
Pardon us a bit of disciplinary kvelling.
[By the way, to give credit where due, the "Word of the Day" feature at randomhouse.com, where I linked for the information on kvelling, was devised and written over a period of years by Jesse Sheidlower, who is now editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary. See his page Jesse's Word of the Day for more information.
I note that http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/ now leads to an error page which tell me that "There has been an error; Could not find a word to display in folder "index_home/words/" which is less than 999 days old." Indeed. ]
Posted by Mark Liberman at February 11, 2005 08:15 AM