Those tributes will tell you that Prof. Boyd was a great teacher and a great guy. That certainly jibes with my experience. They will tell you about his ludicrous yet somehow effective teaching style, scrawling some talking points up on the board hoping he'd get to some of them, then diving in and almost immediately launching into stories that ended up miles away from the point he was trying to make, all the while fucking sounding goddamn piece of shit chalk like he fucking had fucking Tourette's — not in a scary way, but in a hilarious way. They will also tell you about how he was just as animated and warm and effusive outside of class as inside it. This is not the sort of thing that undergraduates usually get to find out, at least not at Cal with its 33,000 students. Yet despite the fact that the first class I took from Prof. Boyd had upwards of a hundred people in it, and despite the fact that it wasn't a class that lent itself to a lot of student participation, after I'd made just a couple of comments in class he knew my name and would greet me when I came in and stuff. The next semester I went to his office hours to pick up a reader and he asked me where I was from, mentioned that he'd given me "a big fucking A-plus" the previous semester and then observed that I looked kind of down and asked what was up. I mentioned that I'd had a falling out with a friend of mine and that it was looking like I probably wouldn't be hanging out with her anymore. He was sympathetic. Months later, I'm walking across campus talking to a girl I'd recently met when I run into Prof. Boyd heading the other way. "Hey, Adam, great to see you, how the fuck are you— oh, is this your friend?" he asks. Not knowing that he was referring to someone specific — it even took me a minute to make the connection — she said yes. "Well I'm telling you, stick with him, sweetie, he's really going places," Prof. Boyd told her. Again, in a huge public university it is not the usual thing for star professors to try to help out random undergraduates with their personal lives. The fact that he even remembered the incidental angst of some guy in the eighth row boggled me. But it's not the reason I'm writing this.

The sense I get is that when most people wax nostalgic about their bright college days, they're thinking about them as a brief window between achieving independence and being burdened with responsibility — a time of freedom, of easy socializing, of parties and carnal delights where applicable. But I'm a geek. When I think back fondly on collegiate life I'm generally thinking about my actual classes. Though I can't help but think of them a bit ruefully as well. See, some of my classes were awesome. I'd go in two or three times a week and listen to some eccentric genius present an angle from which to view literature and the world that never would have occurred to me on my own in a million years, but which explained so much that I'd walk out feeling as if my brain had just grown three sizes. But some of my classes were pretty dull. And it wasn't until about midway through my third year that I realized that, hey, maybe I should stop choosing classes based on the book lists and start choosing them based on the critical factor separating group one from group two: the professor. Here I was at the top-ranked English program in the United States, with a roster of star professors, and I wasn't really doing anything to seek them out. So I missed out on a lot of the big names, like Janet Adelman and Stephen Greenblatt. But I learned my lesson in time to take classes from Stephen Booth, Frederick Crews, Ojars Krātiņš, and Julian Boyd. And what I will remember Prof. Boyd for, much more than our brief personal interactions, is what he taught me about his field of expertise, the philosophical underpinnings of English grammar.

Take the idea of the future. I had always been taught that English had three simple tenses and three perfect tenses. Prof. Boyd quickly demonstrated that I had been fed nothing but lies. English has only two tenses, the past and the present. The perfect isn't a kind of tense; it's an aspect. I had never heard of aspect before. In the US it generally isn't taught outside of linguistics classes. The only students I've ever had who had heard of it were native speakers of Russian, in which aspect is dominant. But it's pretty dominant in English grammar as well; I might go so far as to say that teaching grammar without mentioning aspect is like teaching math without discussing multiplication. Certainly the concept came up — every year from seventh grade onward my French teacher would point out that "je parle" means not just "I speak" but also "I am speaking" and "I do speak." But no one ever made explicit to me the grammar underlying the three English phrases until Prof. Boyd. Encoded in every verb phrase are a tense, an aspect, a voice and a mood, and often the means of conveying this information is a word known as a modal, sometimes several of them. Since there is no future tense in English, Prof. Boyd pointed out, one must choose whether to convey the future by using a time marker or a modal, and if the latter, which modal, "will" or "shall" — unless of course one decides to express the future using the prospective aspect, requiring a conjugated form of "to be going to" (or, as Prof. Boyd would invariably write it on the board, "to be gonna"). "I leave tomorrow" implies a deterministic view of events, a timeline already carved in stone which we are merely traveling along, not shaping. "I will leave," by contrast, is firmly on the free-will side of the debate, suggesting that the speaker believes that his intentions are the important consideration where the future is concerned. "I shall leave" conveys a sense of submission to one's obligations; "I'm gonna leave" suggests a contemplative outlook with an emphasis not on the future itself but on the tentative plans of the present. Wait, but Americans don't say "shall" anymore, you might argue. Exactly!, Prof. Boyd would reply. And what are the implications of the fact that in this country the modal expressing the idea of responsibility has atrophied into disuse? (Except he would say "fuck" a few times when so replying.)

Prof. Boyd had us read "Big Two-Hearted River" by Ernest Hemingway. "Big Two-Hearted River" is about actions vs. activities!, Prof. Boyd declared. Actions are punctual events! Completed actions are achievements! But activities are durative and a completed activity is merely an accomplishment! "I read a book" is an action; "I read for three hours" is an activity. And in "Big Two-Hearted River," Nick hates activities! They remind him of the war! Look at these lines: "Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This was different though. Now things were done. There had been this to do. Now it was done." Everything the war wasn't! The war had no visible endpoint; it was protractive, and thus atelic — no goals, just meaningless activity and death! Now keep reading! What does Nick do next? He opens a can and eats beans. THIS IS WHAT THE WHOLE STORY IS ABOUT! NICK LIKES TO EAT BEANS! Why? Because there's no starting and stopping — you just do it! There's a bean to eat, and you fucking eat it! You can't be stuck in the middle of eating a fucking bean! There's never any question of whether you will ever be able to stop eating this goddamn piece of shit bean! EATING BEANS IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF BEING IN THE WAR!

Damn, that was a great class. And once I'd learned to think about these issues, I started to see them all over the place. I wrote a paper on Salinger's "Zooey" which observed that when Zooey is first trying to talk some sense into Franny, his arguments kind of flounder around, landing at irrelevant endpoints or just kind of unraveling — and at the same time, he is "aimlessly mobile," and the verb phrases describing what he is doing are full of inceptives that never get completed and atelic activities that reflect the atelicity of his speech. But then, when he finally realizes what he actually wants to communicate to his sister, the narration is like something straight out of "Big Two-Hearted River": full of actions instead of activities, and goal-directed actions to boot. (I talked about this paper with Prof. Boyd and he claimed that he had been the one to introduce Salinger to Zen back in the '50s.)

As I continued in academia I found myself returning often to the sort of linguistic analysis of texts that I picked up in Prof. Boyd's classes. (Here's an example.) Had I stayed in grad school I might well have ended up using it in my dissertation. Instead, I bailed out — and yet still found that what I'd learned from Prof. Boyd was invaluable in my day job. See, last March ETS folded grammar into the SAT, and so I've ended up borrowing liberally from my memories of Prof. Boyd's lectures in teaching this stuff to students. It is hard to suppress a smile when a student asks, "What's the difference between choice (B) and choice (D)?" and I get to say, "Why, that's a matter of verb aspect! Have you ever heard of verb aspect? No? Then allow me to explain!" and channel Julian Boyd. Minus the profanity. Usually.

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