Ludicrous professors shunned in Ireland?
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Breffni O'Rourke sent a link to a current news story with the headline "'Ludicrous' professors cannot be appointed – ATU President". It starts:
The inability of Technological Universities to appoint professors is causing significant regional imbalance that needs to be urgently addressed, according to the President of Atlantic Technological University (ATU), the largest university outside of Dublin.
Reading the full article, we learn that 'ludicrous' is quoted from ATU president Dr. Orla Flynn's complaint about the fact that "the greater Dublin region has approximately 370 professors", while bureaucratic sluggishness (or regional prejudice?) means that "There are zero in the north west and in other regions of Ireland":
"It’s ludicrous to think that we can’t appoint professors to lead the research programmes associated with those programmes like every other university in Europe".
So the professors in question are not ludicrous — in fact they don't exist.
As usual, we need to note that the headline is not the responsibility of the journalist who wrote the story, in this case Shane Ó Curraighín.
The obligatory screenshot:
Mike Grubb said,
September 26, 2025 @ 8:28 am
Ah, for want of a "that".
Frans de Jonge said,
September 26, 2025 @ 9:56 am
Or even just a simple colon or comma, or just about any other punctuation mark.
cameron said,
September 26, 2025 @ 10:26 am
someone needs to endow a chair with the formal title "Ludicrous Professor"
Jonathan Smith said,
September 26, 2025 @ 11:37 am
Big oops — this headline is sure to dissuade some quality applicants
Mark Liberman said,
September 26, 2025 @ 12:07 pm
@cameron "someone needs to endow a chair with the formal title "Ludicrous Professor""
Maybe Ludacris?
J.W. Brewer said,
September 26, 2025 @ 12:31 pm
The older English universities have some endowed chairs with interestingly-adjectival titles, like the Lucasian Professor (of mathematics) at Cambridge, originally endowed by a fellow surnamed Lucas, where "Lucas Professor" would be more standard at a U.S. university. If Ireland has the same convention as England, you could have a Ludacrisian Professor. Or Ludicrousian, I guess depending on the donor's preference.
JPL said,
September 26, 2025 @ 6:40 pm
Even without a colon or a "that", you could preface the headline sentence with "It's" and it would work. With the delivery of the original headline in spoken language, even without the "It's" or "that", the intonation contour would differentiate the two possible senses by distinguishing two possible prosodic units, indicated by a falling contour after "ludicrous" vs. its absence and/or falling after "professors" or at the end. ("[ludicrous] [professors …] vs. "[[ludicrous professors] cannot …]".)
JPL said,
September 26, 2025 @ 6:52 pm
BTW, these intonational differences can be considered part of expressive form, like segmental differences, but have these kinds of phenomena been included in syntactic models like Chomskyan grammar?
Peter Cyrus said,
September 27, 2025 @ 5:14 am
Do we know why writers adjectivize proper names, as in Freudian slip or Shavian alphabet? We don't say Fordian car, New Yorkian Times, or Bordelaisian wine, and we do say sea lion instead of marine lion and telephone pole instead of telephonic pole.
Philip Taylor said,
September 27, 2025 @ 7:25 am
I dont, Peter, but I do know that while still sufficiently young to still be attending college, I asserted (when asked by the lecturer if anyone could explain the phrase "Keynesian economics") that the economics in question were presumably named after someone called (eye-spelling) "Key Knees".
Philip Taylor said,
September 27, 2025 @ 7:26 am
Oops, "… don't …".
Peter Taylor said,
September 27, 2025 @ 10:02 am
Thanks to J.W. Brewer, whose comment prompted an interesting read of the lists of Cambridge and Oxford chairs. In some sense the straightforward genitives are the most interesting: e.g. to say that Erasmus was Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity might easily be misinterpreted as implying that Erasmus taught Lady Margaret. I was also amused to see that Cambridge has a Disney Professor.
Amy de Buitléir said,
September 27, 2025 @ 12:08 pm
When I was at (what is now) ATU, there were definitely some ludicrous professors, especially in management.
Bob Ladd said,
September 27, 2025 @ 12:28 pm
@ Peter Cyrus
Do we know why writers adjectivize proper names, as in Freudian slip or Shavian alphabet?
It's not just writers, it's a part of the way English works, at least to some extent. Coining an adjective is a systematic way of indicating that the person adjectivized is somehow a prominent personification of a set of ideas or attitudes (like Freud, Chomsky, Keynes, and Shaw, in the examples above).
The fact that this is not just a matter of individual whim but that some sort of grammatical principle is involved is also shown by a clear difference between UK and US English. In the US, American state names are normally used as they are, forming compounds like "California legislature" and "Virginia schools", whereas they are usually adjectivized when the occasion arises in UK English (i.e. "Californian legislature", "Virginian schools".) Even after 40 years in the UK, this still sounds weird to me.
Michael Watts said,
September 27, 2025 @ 9:17 pm
Well, depending on what you mean by "some sort of grammatical principle", the same evidence could easily support the claim that there is no particular principle involved, because different communities have made different choices and there do not appear to be any side effects of either choice.
Unless the grammatical principle is just the observation that constructions of this type are similar to each other, I'd kind of like to see some analogies drawn to other grammatical structures within each dialect, which would hopefully explain why the choice went one way in one dialect and not in the other one.
Drawing from Peter Cyrus' examples, my instinct is that we may not say "Bordelaisian wine", but that I would be completely unsurprised to see that a variety of wine was named using the adjective of the place where it come from ("Athenian wine").
In fact, thinking about it further: I prefer Athenian wine, Venetian wine, Roman wine, Italian wine, French wine, Thai wine… I would reject the idea of Athens wine, Venice wine, Rome wine, Italy wine, France wine, or Thailand wine.
On the other hand, I prefer California wine and Napa wine to Californian wine and Napan wine.
So the grammatical rule I would draw from this is actually "certain regions use an adjectival descriptor, and others use a bare noun, and you have to memorize which ones do which", which is the opposite of a grammatical principle in my book. It's just an arbitrary fact that things associated with Rome are called "Roman" where things associated with Napa are called "Napa".
Michael Watts said,
September 27, 2025 @ 9:19 pm
In what I see as a related phenomenon, it's generally possible to describe a metal object as "golden" or as bare "gold" according to the free choice of the speaker.