Today I gave a lecture on the rise and fall of the field machine translation to students who major in French.

“This is a real live representative of the field,” the students’ professor kept saying. “Ask all of your questions now while she is still with us.”

This made me feel like I was not expected to live much longer.

The best gift parents can give to a child is what is called “a positive mother/father complex.”*

A mother complex is the way you relate to the universe and see your place in the world.

If you have a positive mother complex, you see the world as a place that is good to you. You believe that everything will ultimately turn out right for you. You feel that people generally like you and luck favors you. You see every problem as a small temporary blip on the radar of your general happiness and contentment.

If you have a negative mother complex, you see the world as mostly alien, confusing, and threatening. Every instance of joy is a small temporary blip on the radar of your general anxiety and worry. You find it hard to believe that things will go right for you and luck will favor you.

A father complex is the way you relate to others. It has to do with your social and professional realization.

If you have a positive father complex, you see yourself as a valuable member of society with a lot to contribute. You are confident in your capacity to be professionally successful and valued by others. For instance, before giving a talk in front of an audience, you know for a fact everybody will love you.

If you have a negative father complex, you struggle professionally and keep seeing yourself as an impostor. You find that remaining law-abiding bothers you. The feelings of your badness and worthlessness keep bothering you. Before giving a talk in front of a large audience, you fear people wil not like you or even ridicule you.

Mind you, these complexes are not about the actual state of affairs. They only have to do with individual perceptions that need not have any basis in reality.

If you can wake up every day knowing that you are good and the world is good to you and everythhing is bound to work out, there is nothing more valuable than that. This is why I believe that parents who create an environment of drama, worry, anxiety, insecurity around their children over silly, unimportant things like Disney princesses, Pledge of Allegiance, school prayer, etc. are jerks. If you spend all day and every day praying to Disney princesses, that will not inflict even a tiny percentage of harm done by negative mother / father complexes.

* I know everybody hates terminology but I promise these will be the only terms I will use. They have nothing to do with the actual mother and father. I also agree in advance that the terms might not be very fortunate, so let’s skip the discussion about the evilness of the terminology and concentrate on the concepts it denotes.

I’m preparing for a lecture on the history of machine translation, and my father is helping me by sharing his memories of the field’s development.

In 1982, there was a huge (and hugely important) international conference on machine translation held in Moscow. I’m sure you all know how tense things were between the two major organizers of the Cold War. So when the North American scholars arrived at the conference, everything they did and said was analyzed under a microscope on both sides.

My father was a young, promising scholar in the field of applied linguistics who was making the best use he could of his perfect English (which was an impossible rarity in the Soviet Union.) Coupled with his Jewish last name that made his origins confusing, my father’s American accent often attracted people who thought he was a fellow American. “Ah, it’s so great to see a fellow Texan here!” he would often be told. “I’m from Dallas. You?”

So my father spent all his time with the North American scholars. After the panel meetings, he went to the university cafeteria with a group of American scientists who were all in their seventies. After the meal, my father decided to take a walk around downtown Moscow. Soon, however, he started feeling really bad. Remaining conscious was an effort, and he was in excruciating pain. He ended up hospitalized and discovered that the North American scholars were all at the same hospital in critical condition.

The BBC immediately released a report, “A terrorist act or KGB’s provocation? Why is the USSR poisoning American scholars?”

Of course, the KGB immediately started investigating because it didn’t want an international scandal to develop. What it discovered was actually worse than any deliberate provocation. It turned out that, on the day when the American scholars ate at the cafeteria, the food was served by a dishwasher who forgot to wear rubber gloves over her fingers that were infected with fungi. So the food got infected. My father, who was the youngest person among the scholars, recovered quickly, while the academics who were both older and less accustomed to Soviet cuisine, barely managed to survive.

I’m sure at this point the KGB wished this had been a result of deliberate provocation than something this shameful.