Job title: Professor
Department: Communication Studies
How long have you worked at Whitworth? Since 1983
What do you like best about your job? The enthusiasm and passion of our students, and the role we faculty have in nurturing their potential
Favorite book: To follow the example of the new Nobel Prize winner for literature, Vargas Llosa, I’d say whatever book I’m currently working on.
Favorite movie: “A Man for All Seasons.”
Favorite quote: This is extraordinarily difficult for someone who has produced five anthologies of quotations. But it would probably be, “Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.” Philo Judaeus
Favorite music: Mozart piano concertos; the Brandenburg Concertos (Bach); various trumpet concertos. I guess I like concertos.
Birth place: Cape Town, South Africa
We’d be surprised to know that…I worked as a guide on an ostrich farm during university vacations.
I collect…quotations, photos of unusual signs.
If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go? Luxor in Egypt, Machu Picchu in Peru, Petra in Jordan, Eastern Europe (especially Prague), and return visits to Baalbek in Lebanon, and my home town of Cape Town.
If the whole world was listening, what would you say? The first thing I’d say is, “Are the simultaneous translators ready to go?”
Favorite childhood TV show: Didn’t have TV when I was growing up in South Africa.
Least favorite word: I have no least favorite word but I have several favorites – not everyday words, to be sure, but all of them delightful discoveries along the way: “steatopygious,” “borborygmous,” “underground” (one of the few – maybe the only – English word that both begins and ends in “und”) and “facetious” (all the vowels, in order, once each. There are about another five or six words like this. Can you think of them?) And “buttpuckering” has merit, too (not included in all dictionaries).
If you could go on a road trip with anyone (from the past or present), who would you choose and where would you go? Rather than a road trip, I’d probably do another Semester at Sea voyage around with world, with my wife, Sue, and my children, Sarah and Matthew.
