The university flag at Princeton is flying at half-mast. It’s an appropriate tribute to Bernard Lewis, who died on May 19, less than a fortnight from his 102nd birthday. Professor Lewis was one of the great scholars of the 20th century and a happy Princetonian. He left the University of London and moved to New Jersey in 1974. He could be testy about the lack of gastronomic and bookstore possibilities in his new home, but given his London and Paris pedigrees, he was goodhearted about the insufficiencies. I’ve been taking out Lewis’s books since he passed, skimming them, looking at the notes I’ve jotted in the margins over the decades. One can read Lewis’s many works as one reads great novels: repeatedly, for something new always pops out. I’d often circled Arabic, Persian, and Turkish words because they are the signposts that Lewis used to demarcate the primary themes of Islamic civilization. Lewis was old-fashioned and modern: He insisted on understanding foreigners in their own languages, the first rule of the much-maligned orientalists, and he always understood, in much the same way that Wittgenstein did, that our entire frame of reference, our identities—the superstructure of our thought—hinge on words and how they radiate within us.

Lewis is easily the greatest punmeister I have encountered: He could pun in a dozen languages and he would eagerly await to see if the listener picked up his humor, which could be, befitting his English sensibilities, subtle. His luminescent eyes and omnipresent grin would immediately reward a listener who caught his playfulness. If it took several minutes to catch the allusion, if it took days, the professor always, cheerfully, gave partial credit. Lewis was sincerely, deeply, unstoppably puckish—a relief in any academic field, but especially in Islamic studies, which increasingly seems populated with killjoys. I always saw the professor’s river of puns as a polite but impish way of taking issue with the political correctness that had descended on American academic life, the crude earnestness that cheats young men and women of the immensity of the knowledge and experiences that make good minds great.