May 17, 1972

Among important dates in the life of poet and linguistic scholar Anatoly Liberman, (born 1937) are his wedding day, his son's birthday (May 17, 1972). and the day in 1975 this Russian family arrived in the United States. Liberman, now on the faculty at the University of Minnesota, is the author of, just to mention his more recent books:

An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction, (2008)
and
A Bibliography of English Etymology: Sources and Word List (2009).

Liberman reaches an audience beyond the academic with his column published under the aegis of the Oxford University Press, titled The Oxford Etymologist.

We quote from this last forum, the November 27 2013 edition:

....[T]he belief in theriomorphic (divine or semi-divine) creatures has been attested in many cultures. Centaurs are half-men, half-horses, the Sphinx is half-lioness, half-woman, and the ancient gods who were later represented as being attended by animals (Athena and her owl, Zeus and his eagle, and others) were at one time hybrids of human-looking deities and beasts or birds, such as the Egyptian god Thoth. ....

Linguistics stoutly pursued leads to bigger questions.  Liberman elsewhen (January 8 2014) says:

The great question of etymology is why a certain combination of sounds has the meaning ascribed to it. Why does gray mean “gray”? Apparently, when color names were coined, they referred to some visible objects....

And his conclusion reaches beyond the discipline: "...gray is all linguistic theory but golden is the living tree of language."