Laudator Temporis Acti

Jay H. Jasanoff and Brian D. Joseph, "Calvert Ward Watkins," Language 91.1 (March, 2015) 245-252 (at 245):

Cal began as a prodigy and never stopped being one. Exposure to Latin and Greek in school made him hungry for more, and by the time he was fifteen he had decided to be an Indo-Europeanist. He had already shown himself to be a remarkable practical language learner. Once, when he changed schools and was found to be behind the class in French, the problem was solved by his father taking him to see French movies, making sure he always got seated behind a lady in a fancy hat so that he would be unable to see the subtitles. In later years it was rumored, no doubt apocryphally, that he could get into a train at one end of a European country whose language he did not know and come out at the other end a fluent speaker. As he always emphasized, however, being a 'linguist' in this sense had nothing to do with being a linguist in the other. He would illustrate the point by relating how, when the famous Indo-Europeanists Carl Darling Buck (American) and Antoine Meillet (French) met face to face, they had no common language and had to use an interpreter.

Id. (at 248-249):

The best way to recover older syntactic patterns, he held, was to build on synchronically anomalous structures of the type God save the king in English, which had to be old because they could not be new. To underscore the point, he quoted one of his favorite aphorisms: 'The first law of comparative grammar is that you've got to know what to compare'. A few pages later, expatiating on the near-identity of the Hittite, Vedic, and Greek versions of a single quasi-attested sentence ('The one who wins gets a prize'), he had occasion to drop another mot of which he was fond: 'If we want to know how the Indo-Europeans talked, it can be useful to consider what they talked about.'

Id. (at 250-251):

Cal was a charismatic personality and an inspirational teacher. He had no use for the kind of teaching he disapprovingly referred to as 'indogermanisch *a ergibt a' ('IE *a gives a')—recycling cut and dried factual knowledge in the classroom. Books could do that after hours. Classes for Cal were an occasion for object lessons in how knowledge could be used to generate more knowledge. He was never happier than when he could stand before a roomful of students and demonstrate, with immense flair, how a word, phrase, or motif in one IE language was historically the same, after secondary developments were stripped away, as a word, phrase, or motif in another. There was no unseemly haste in his courses; he took seriously Jakobson's definition of philology as 'the art of reading slowly', and fully savored every construction, formula, and metrical unit before moving on to the next. He taught by example. His lectures were carefully crafted masterpieces, sometimes ending with a return to the theme with which he had begun, in the manner of an IE-style ring composition. A student who followed his model not only learned how to construct an argument—a skill surprisingly rare in philology-heavy fields—but also acquired an almost esthetic sense of what kinds of problems were worth working on and what kinds of solutions were worth looking for. While always insisting on the highest standards of scholarly knowledge and accuracy, he believed that bold and elegant ideas deserved to be sought out and nurtured, even if they sometimes failed to bear fruit. Not the least of the lessons he taught was the need to be wrong some of the time. 'Was ich da geschrieben habe, ist Quatsch' ('What I wrote there is nonsense') he liked to say, quoting a favorite remark of the great Celticist Rudolf Thurneysen (who, like Cal, was usually right).