What the archives of academic job ads can tell us | Hacker News Reader

What the archives of academic job ads can tell us

jgoodwin.net

60 pointsbenbreen16 comments

The job ads from 1972 are priceless. This one in particular is like something out of a David Foster Wallace novel:

"We may very well have an opening or so for September, 1972. Publications definitely helpful, as is degree from high-ranking school and ability to receive serve in the backhand corner. David Orr, Chairman, English"

Does anyone have any idea what crespo and crespulum mean? I checked two of my dead-tree Latin dictionaries and even resorted to an online search and came up empty. This is going to stick in my craw for a while until I can sort it out. Any other Latinists out there with ideas?

I was wondering the same thing. Crespare means "to curl" in Italian. So it means... Who will curl the curly? I suspect it's some sort of pun on a well-known Latin phrase, but I have no idea what it would be.

Don't be misled: the -are and -ire endings mark different conjugations (per my other comment, a Latin "crespare" would have become "créper" in French, which means "frizz" or "crimp" and is thus almost certainly cognate to your Italian word, but not to the "crespit" of the OP).

The phrasing is very similar to "quis custodiet custodies" - who watches the watchmen - which is a very well known phrase. The most I can make of this is "Who $foo's the $foo'ers".

I was wondering the same thing; I checked the French dictionary on my desk and "crépir" (which would be the expected derivative of "crespire") means "roughcast", or plastering/cementing without smoothing the surface. I also found a Portuguese word "crespo" meaning something like "ragged". So I can sort of make sense of the phrase "quis crespit crespulum" in context as "those in a rough spot leave rough edges".

But I'm not at all confident of that analysis.

I'm also curious because Crespo is my last name. "Quis crespit crespulum" might make a nice personal slogan — depending on what it means.

Not sure, but maybe: "Quis crepuit crepulum." Who rattles the one/thing rattling? I want to say that adding the "s" is a medievalism, but I can't find evidence of that. Crepo is also first conjugation so this might just be totally wrong. Maybe it was just to make the phrase closer to custodiet and custodies?

It's BS Latin like the non legitima carborundum stuff. Just fake Latin.

Why make every reader click through to the twitter feed? At the very least, you could embed a screenshot of the twitter post but it would seem simpler to link direct to the image.

You're probably blocking social media and/or tracking on sites. If you access the site with none of that, the author's Twitter posts are seen on the blog post itself. If you are blocking it, you get the the plain text version with a link instead of the image. It's the equivalent of the alt attribute in for the <img> HTML tag.

MLA = Modern Language Association of America

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Language_Association

The JIL is the recognized professional source for announcements of full-time faculty positions available in the fields of English and foreign languages in North American colleges and universities

http://www.mla.org/resources/jil

For anyone curious about sampling effects, a scan of the December 1972 MLA Job Information List is at http://rid.olfo.org/doc/mlajilocr/jil_eng_1972_12-OCR.pdf . (This is the one that contains the Latin that bartonfink and others are curious about; p50, ordered by ZIP code.)

Why are we looking at the twitter feed? Just so there is some kind of graphic?

The way I'm reading this, the write up should have been an imgur submission of ad snippets posted on reddit.

Imaging a $1M salary being common in 40 years!

True, and a house in a good neighborhood will cost 10 million.

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