Remembering Geoffrey Nunberg (1945–2020)

The New York Times reports that Geoffrey Nunberg, a Fresh Air Language Commentator, UC Berkeley School of Information Professor, Small Press Distribution Spelling Bee Judge, and friend to poets and poetry, has died. He was 75. Although Nunberg did not (as far as we know…) publish poetry, his scholarship sometimes engaged with it, including a 2005 Fresh Air segment about the practice of poetry memorization. In his NYT obituary, Richard Sandomir notes that Nunberg read Ogden Nash as a child, whose "light verse and unconventional rhymes delighted him." More:

In a reminiscence on NPR last week, Ms. [Terry] Gross recalled that Mr. Nunberg was interested in how young people 'create new words and give old words new meanings,' but not in 'scolding people for not following the rules of grammar.'

Geoffrey David Nunberg was born on June 1, 1945, in Manhattan and grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y. His mother, Sally (Sault) Nunberg, was a teacher, and his father, Jacob Nunberg, was a commercial real estate broker.

His parents raised him and his sister with an “exaggerated concern” for language, he told Stanford magazine in 2005. [….]

[H]e took a circuitous route to a linguistics career. He studied pre-law at Columbia College in the early 1960s but left to explore drawing at the Art Students League of New York. His pursuit of art did not last long and he returned to Columbia, where a course on linguistics hooked him.

We'll miss his presence and commentary. Learn more at NYT.