“EDNote: Linguist?”  I do linguistics, and I wouldn’t consider VN a linguist, as I understand the term.  But in popular usage, a linguist is somebody who speaks many languages, and VN certainly qualifies on that score.

Eric Hyman

As far as context goes I think we’ve got the meaning right, with qualification: Anyone’s tears (be it Mrs. H. or Mr. G.) staged for public consumption are shallow. As for “linguist”, it is used here in the meaning of philologist (the one who “loves words”), whom VN, in his unrepeatable way, certainly was.

- George

----
ED's reply [initially to Eric Hyman's post]: You are of course right!  I was drawing attention, tongue in cheek, to the imprecise and/or inaccurate use of all these components for the sake of a journalistic effect.  It is this kind of blitheness that so irks V. in Goodman's "biography" of Sebastian Knight, for example, and that relates to the biographies romancees bemoaned here and there, especially in The Gift.

Coincidentally, in class today somebody asked whether Nabokov was a philologist in the American sense (as opposed to the Russian sense, in which he undoubtedly was one).  I think that in much of his commentary to Eugene Onegin and The Lay of Igor's Campaign, and probably in other spots that don't jump immediately to mind, he certainly was.  And there is a great deal of evidence that artistically, too, he was constantly aware of the historical layers hidden beneath the surface of any modern word--a fact he exploits regularly.  Oh yes, and then there are the invented (partial) languages (Zemblan, and Bend Sinister's) . . . . but  most likely, the article's author wasn't thinking of those kinds of credentials. 

Irrelevantly, there is a delightful South-Appalachian mountain term for polyglot, which I learned around a decade ago : "lingster".

Thanks for all replies!
~SB

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