In memoriam John Robert Ross (May 7, 1938 to May 13, 2025). The news of Haj’s death came in my morning e-mail on Wednesday 5/14, right next to a Bizarro cartoon with a cowboy joke / restaurant joke, turning on an absurd pun on ranch dressing that Haj (who was a walking library of jokes) would have appreciated, and so with a synchronicity that Haj would have delighted in.
J.R. Ross was an outsized figure in linguistics, whose ideas (beginning with his 1967 MIT dissertation, Constraints on Variables in Syntax) altered the field. Haj Ross was a literally outsized person physically, a large, blocky man (he really did play football for Yale as an undergraduate) with a big presence. And Haj, no surname needed, had an outsized personality — endlessly imaginative, enormously funny, astonishingly empathetic and gentle, “big and sparkly” (me on Facebook), with “an amazing facility for the intricacies of English” (John Beavers on FB) and “an innocent sense of wonder about language, poetry, and the world” (Susan Fischer on FB). And resolutely counter-cultural (often barefooted, and rarely standing on ceremony), also attuned to all the Zen-inflected frequencies on your radio dial.
He was a good friend of mine, and an inspiration to me, from 1963 on. So this posting is hard to write. I will collect myself and pick out some facts, some assortment of outrageous anecdotes, a small selection of his poetry and artwork, and even (since, like Haj, I’m hopelessly a linguist) a note about a neglected feature of his work on syntax that I think is important in the intellectual history of the field. I will do all that in another posting, I hope tomorrow.
Today I’ll start the way Haj often started his public presentations. With a joke, that Bizarro cartoon (remember the cartoon?). From which a Google AI Overview search then led me, goofily, into a strange dusty canyon of verse, Jim Ross’s self-published Pull Up a Chair: Cowboy Poetry. Truly, Haj would have loved that.
The 5/14 Bizarro. Wayno’s title: “Culinary Cosplay”:
(#1) There’s the culinary compound ranch dressing, and there’s the apparel compound ranch dressing — one for the restaurant world, one for the cowboy world, so that the cowboy-garbed waiter belongs, absurdly, to both worlds at once (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
The two kinds of ranch dressing.
— culinary ranch dressing. First, from NOAD:
noun dressing: a sauce for salads, typically one consisting of oil and vinegar mixed together with herbs or other flavorings: vinaigrette dressing.
Then the culinary compound ranch dressing ‘salad dressing associated with ranches’ (for the story, see the material in my 10/28/19 posting “Fried pickles with ranch”). From Wikipedia on the foodstuff:
Ranch dressing is a type of salad dressing made of some combination of buttermilk, salt, garlic, onion, mustard, herbs (commonly chives, parsley, and dill), and spices (commonly black pepper, paprika, and ground mustard seed), mixed into a sauce based on mayonnaise, or another oil emulsion.
— apparel ranch dressing. We start with the nominal gerund dressing of the verb dress ‘wear clothing of a specified kind’, from which comes the compound ranch dressing ‘wearing ranch clothes, in cowboy garb’.
Items of cowboy garb, many illustrated in #1:
leather boots with wooden heels; jeans; chaps; wide leather belt with large metal buckle; holster with gun; heavy work gloves; Western style shirt; Western vest; cowboy bandana; cowboy hat
My Google search. I wanted samples of Haj’s poetry, so I did a Google search on:
J.R. Ross poetry
(Already you can see a problem looming. Haj isn’t his “real” name, so searches don’t pull up much. But lots of people have names like J.R. Ross, so searches will pull up lot of junk. And so it was, especially since Google provided an AI Overview, which doesn’t weight fidelity to the search term very highly at all. What I got was this:
J.R. Ross is likely a reference to either Jim Ross [AZ: James A. Ross], a cowboy poet who published “Pull Up a Chair” in 1987, or [AZ: the really off-the-wall, but moderately famous] Ross Gay, a poet known for his work with the Poetry Foundation and other publications. Jim Ross’s “Pull Up a Chair” is a collection of cowboy poetry. Ross Gay’s poetry, on the other hand, explores a variety of themes, including love, grief, and identity, and can be found on his website and in various journals.
The cover of James A. Ross’s self-published 1987 paperback Pull Up a Chair:
(#2) Cowboy poetry jogs along like a good ride on horseback (I hear the song “Happy Trails”), with simple rhyming lines of common folk-metrical types, on highly sentimental themes of the mythical cowboy life (heavy on nostalgia for days gone by); I haven’t been able to look inside Jim Ross’s book, but I don’t expect any surprises — and Haj’s thoughtful blank verse (think: William Carlos Williams) is utterly unlike this
So: no cowboy poetry in Haj. But cowboy jokes, those he could reel out for long periods of time, without pausing and without repeating himself. I saw him do it — it was a kind of parlor trick he performed — in the summer of 1963. When he took challenges from those of us on a summer project at the MITRE Corp. in Bedford MA (under the auspices of the US Air Force). During breaks, we played a lot. Lobbing joke challenges at Haj was one of our games.
Early on, someone asked for golf jokes, but Haj said that was too broad, he could do those all day long, we had to restrict the category. One of our number, no doubt Bruce Fraser (who was Scots American in just the same way I’m Swiss American, and had the name for it, just as I do), called for Scots golf jokes, which I think Haj did for 10 minutes straight. (The details of this story may have been bent some in transmission from 62 years ago; memory is like that)
And then came cowboy jokes. Maybe in two sets, clean jokes and dirty jokes. Haj was actually able to tell dirty jokes with an air of sweet playfulness, somehow devoid of aggression and contempt, now that was a talent.