Falling in love with humanity

William (Bill) Labov, pioneering scholar of language change, died on December 17, 2024. His MA and PhD theses in the mid 1960s revolutionized the field of language variation and change, and he spent the subsequent 60 years building on that foundation. This is a memoriam written by one of his final PhD students. This piece has two aims. The first is to invite you, the reader, into the feeling of being in Bill’s orbit. My hope is that by the end of it, you feel the same sort of love for him that many of us do. And the second is to convince you of my main thesis: that what is now understood as Bill’s genius could not have taken place without his preexisting love of humanity.