Calvert Watkins
Today, about five weeks after the fact, I learned of the death of Dr. Calvert Watkins. I was very privileged to have taken several classes and seminars with him in the late ’80s and early ’90s at Harvard — and my Linguistics 101 class and Sanskrit class were taught by his wife, Dr. Stephanie Jamison. But I first “knew” him, of course, as the editor of the enthralling Indo-European roots appendix to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, which I discovered in 8th or 9th grade.…