Pick your field carefully. Do not go into mathematics.

Do not choose a science, such as physics. These fields have objective standards by which your lack of contribution can be measured.

Do not choose a liberal art, such as literary criticism. Here the standards are wholly and unashamedly subjective, which means that you will have to read a lot in order to find out what other people think, and then write a lot to show that what you think is exactly like what they think, only different. In the absence of objectivity, all that really matters is what your advisor thinks; so why bother with all the reading and writing?

Avoid arithmetic, too, while you’re at it. It’s boring to count stuff, let alone do statistics on it afterward. Eschew psychology.

Instead, pick a field with “physics envy”. (This phrase is often bandied about to demonstrate sophisticated intellectual detachment—a way of washing one’s mental hands after acts of mental self-gratification—but the elegant self-referentiality of the phrase is seldom appreciated: it invokes a non-scientific conceptual framework claimed to capture universal truths about human thought, and then carefully inserts a reference to a real science, to incongruous and hilarious effect.) In such a field, you can coast along on the illusion of objectivity, which your advisor, your committee, and everyone else with tenure has a vested interest in preserving. To question your work, or whether you’ve actually done any, is to call the whole field into question, and nobody wants that. You need not worry that your dissertation defense will be disrupted by any naive persons with an eye for the absence of imperial vesture.

Even in physics-envious fields, strange as it may seem, there are some subfields that have more to prove. In linguistics, say (picking a completely random example), phonology and syntax are at the top of the ivory tower. This is because they have more theoretical infrastructure, i.e. notation; and because phonology is grounded in observable and indisputable phonetic fact, while syntacticians control the world supply of asterisks.

On the other hand, sociolinguistics and discourse pragmatics occupy the ivory sewer. These disciplines (to use the word as loosely as they use all terminology) constitute what has been called “the soft underbelly of linguistics”—this in a field not noted for its overall muscle definition. Even to other linguists, sociolinguists are hard put to demonstrate that their subject matter really exists; and there isn’t even a word for people who specialize in discourse pragmatics.

You will by now be wearying of the effort required to read this, and wondering when it gets to the part about getting a date. Let us stipulate, therefore, that—after a few years of due deliberation, during which you may be compelled to obtain a master’s degree—you choose to write your dissertation on sociolinguistics.

Choose an ambitious topic. The key here is that academics in the humanities are drawn to what they will never understand: literary critics don’t understand how writers write, psychologists don’t understand how people think, and philosophers don’t understand anything at all. By the same token, your committee members will be irresistibly baffled by human interactions. Tell them you’re going to study how the telemarketer last night convinced your advisor to switch long-distance carriers.

Spend the next decade or so attending the occasional

Hurricane Ophelia

seminar, teaching undergrad general-education requirements, discovering underpriced wines from unusual little wineries, and traveling abroad every summer. As a graduate student laboring in the vineyards of knowledge, your cheap labor is being exploited; the compensation is the cheap student fares. You may also get to travel (possibly even at university expense) during the academic year, if you can find appropriate conferences: preferably ones which require only an abstract, rather than actual manuscripts to be published in the proceedings. In the worst case, however, one can submit the same manuscript (such as the 50-page master’s thesis one was compelled to produce) under several different titles.

Do not rush this phase. Savor the freedom from responsibility, the freedom from effort, the freedom from annoyances of any kind. You have nothing to lose but your hair. When nubile first-year graduate students mistake you for a faculty member, you have achieved the exalted status of “Übergrad”.

You are ready to be decanted when the dean’s office starts expressing official concerns about your department’s graduation rates, and when the formidably intelligent member of your thesis committee has gotten tenure at a more prestigious university and been replaced by someone younger than yourself. Your advisor, meanwhile, would really like to switch back to Sprint, but doesn’t know quite how to bring the subject up.

After making a few phone calls and surfing the net for an hour or so, announce promptly at the beginning of the next semester that telemarketing conversations are kept confidential in order to protect the gullible. Your advisor will be secretly relieved.

Since you have done everything you reasonably could to collect real data, with only three months to go before the dean’s official deadline and department credibility hanging in the balance, your committee will now be glad to let you generate your own data.

Recruit eight or ten nubile first-year graduate students (even undergraduates will do, if carefully screened to make sure they’re over 18). Have them take turns pretending to be telemarketers. Record the conversations for posterity. As your committee will certainly agree, these data in themselves constitute a valuable contribution to the field.

After your subjects have participated in the experiment, conduct exit interviews in which you ask them to complete questionnaires on the effectiveness of various pickup lines. Sample questions (some of which will necessarily vary with the gender of your subjects):

Which of the following lines would be most likely to convince you to go out with me this Friday night?

1. Hi! I’m a cunning linguist. Get it?

2. What’s a nice interlocutor like you doing in a speech community like this?

3. Is that a maximal projection or are you just happy to see me?

4. If you were a verb, and I were a noun, would you incorporate me?

5. Are you into Government and Binding? Your c-wish is my c-command.

6. If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?

Be sure to keep the use-versus-mention distinction handy to placate the Human Subjects Committee and avoid harassment charges. Preserve a thin veneer of linguistic legitimacy for question (f) by pointing out that it is ambiguous, and discussing whether the ambiguity is lexical or syntactic.

Pull a few all-nighters writing a hundred pages or so analyzing which linguistic strategies succeed or fail in pretending to try to persuade people to pretend to buy things. Demonstrate your rigorous scientific standards and your grasp of mathematical methodology in linguistics by acknowledging that the sample size that could be gathered within the limited time available is, of course, too small for meaningful statistical analysis. Conclude, however, that your qualitative results indubitably raise provocative questions for future research.

	The Assumption of Slang—Jonathan van der Meer
	The Γραμματο-Χαοτικον Manifesto—Announcement
	SpecGram Vol CL, No 4 Contents