#esll

[...] Second, the Cold War pumped money into the study of Russian and other Slavic languages as a matter of creating expertise for national defense and security. Most of the linguists were happy to teach Russian language as their day job, while their scholarly interest in Slavic languages had little to do with defense concerns and everything to do with understanding language variation, complexity, cultural peculiarities, etc. But to those outside the academy there was always the perception that we were either spies or sympathizers. I couldn’t convince some of my own relatives otherwise.