The climate was similar to RussiaвЂ™s, though the culture was not. Thirty-eight years old, he got on a plane and flew to Minnesota with his wife and three-year-old son. After that, all references to Liberman were expunged from the Russian edition of Beowulf. By the early 1970s he had written the introduction and a line-by-line commentary for the first Russian translation of Beowulf while the book was at the printer, he got permission from the Soviet authorities to emigrate to America as a Jewish refugee. He studied English at school, listened to the BBC at night, and by the time he finished high school could read Dickens in English.ДЄt university, Liberman added German, which he studied вЂњvery seriously and very systematically.вЂќ A few years later, he wrote his PhD dissertation on вЂњMiddle English Vowel Lengthening in Open Syllables.вЂќ In 1965 he joined a group at the Institute of Linguistics studying Scandinavian languages-first Icelandic, then Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, and later early Germanic. From a young age he loved books and novels and poetry-Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol. His mother was a music teacher and his father was an engineer. Liberman was born in Leningrad in 1937, the only son of Jewish parents. Yet itвЂ™s impossible to tell where he is from without asking. The lilt in his voice, or the occasionally odd syntax, makes it clear Liberman is not from Minnesota, where he has lived since 1975, teaching in the department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch at the University of Minnesota. He is driven by the knowledge that if he were gone, no one would have the depth of linguistic knowledge, let alone the drive, to complete his work. His sharp mind, breadth of language, and sense of mission have kept him moving steadily toward that goal for the last half of his life. We use these words every day, but Liberman has been working for thirty years to unearth their roots. They are simple words, common words, but words whose origins are a mystery: he, she, girl, pimp, ever, gawk, yet. At the age of seventy-nine he is trying to finish one of the greatest achievements in the annals of lexicography: a history, as complete as possible, of some the last words in the English language whose origins remain unknown. It may also be from the weight bearing down on his shoulders as he races the clock. The stoop comes from decades spent searching for the hidden history of words in one of the fifteen languages he can read. Audio brought to you by Curio, a LaphamвЂ™s Quarterly partnerДЄnatoly Liberman is a tall man with a slight stoop and an accent that is hard to place.

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