In Memoriam: Allen Walker Read (1906-2002)

OUR SOCIETY [The American Society of Geolinguistics] has been profoundly saddened by the death of Allen Walker Read on October 16, 2002. Dr. Read was considered the foremost living authority on American English. He was a member of our Society for more than thirty years, during which he served first as a member of our Board of Directors and later as President. His lecture What is Linguistic Imperialism? which he gave in October 1968, appeared as an article in the first issue of our journal in 1974. He was a frequent speaker at our meetings. In January 1970 his topic was Geolinguistics of Verbal Taboo. In May 1974 he spoke on A Planetary Perspective on the Migration of Words. In October 1978 he dealt with Evocative Power of National Names. His lecture in December 1978 was on Scope of Geolinguistics. In other talks he dealt with Cliche and Platitude in Language Economy (November 1979), Westward Sweep of the American Vocabulary (March 1981), Milestones in the Branching of British and American Vocabulary (January 1983), and Allegiance to Dictionaries in American Linguistic (December 1984). Regrettably, many of his lectures did not appear in our journal. Dr. Read was a perfectionist, and his many activities in other linguistics organizations probably prevented him from offering final texts for some of his lectures. Before Dr. Read's death, Leonard R.N. Ashley edited Read's unpublished onomastic papers (published by Mellen Press) and Richard Bailey edited Read's previously published papers on other aspects of the American language (published by Duke University Press). Dr. Read's geolinguistic papers have not been collected. However, his article Contribution of Sociolinguistics to the Peace-Keeping Process appeared in our 1982 journal. Our 1984 journal carries the article Impact of 'Ethnicity' on Attitudes toward the English Language. At our twentieth anniversary conference in 1985, Dr. Read spoke on Embattled Dominance of English in the United States. He spoke again at our 1992 conference on Problems of Speakers of English in the Naming of Foreign Countries. His lectures and articles were invariably models of scholarly integrity and at the same time remained perfectly clear to non-specialists, avoiding the technical obfuscation typical of many specialists in linguistics. In the nineties he was the genial host of the Society at meetings held at Columbia University. Unobtrusively, he was a generous financial backer of our Society. Through the years he attended virtually every one of our annual luncheons. The last at which he appeared was on June 2, 2001, his ninety-fifth birthday. Until 1999 he sent out Christmas and new year's greetings to members of our Society and other friends listing innumerable trips with his wife Charlotte (a specialist in Korzybski's general semantics) to linguistics and onomastics conferences at various location in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Dr. Read was a member of many learned societies. At various times he served as President of the American Dialect Society, the American Name Society, the International Linguistic Association, the Semiotic Society of America, and the Dictionary Society of North America. He was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters by Oxford University on January 23, 1988. That same year the North Central Name Society published an Allen Walker Read Festschrift. In his introduction to this Festschrift, Lawrence Urdang comments as follows: He was--and remains to this day--indefatigable. There is scarcely an area of the entire spectrum of language that his papers have not touched on, and he seems to be possessed of an inexhaustible energy that takes him to major and minor conferences throughout the world, from international symposia in London to the most obscure regional names society get-togethers in the hinterlands of America. …

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