ABSTRACT
It was 1960, and I was about to meet Roger Brown for the first time in his office at MIT. We were to discuss the possibility of my editing the proceedings of a conference that would be held in October 1961 at Endicott House in Dedham, Massachusetts, sponsored by the Social Sciences Research Council. Roger Brown had recently begun studies of language development in children; I, in turn, had read several of his papers, as well as Words and Things (Brown, 1958), and had conjured up a mental image of the man who had written these wise, clear, and insightful works. I imagined an elderly scholar of 70 or so, relatively short, with a halo of white hair surrounding his head in unruly curls—a cross between Eric Erikson and Albert Einstein. Entering his office, I found instead an extremely tall, athletic-looking young man, and I hesitated, waiting for the eminent elder statesman of my imagination to appear. But when he spoke, the elegant sentences and wry intelligent humor soon made it apparent that, despite appearances, this was the wise scholar himself.
