The points below are pieces of advice to undergrads and will soon become relevant as we are heading fast towards the autumn semester. Anyone having an intimate relationship with general linguistics will probably consider them still valuable even in the next spring semester and well beyond. As a linguistics major myself I have had to face, on several occasions, the dilemma of taking up a number of optional courses in various topics of linguistics ranging from bi-directional pragmatics, to statistical models of language processing in female quails, to implementing Panini in GPSG. Since it is a subtle matter to decide whether a course will be to our taste after only the first class (or reading the syllabus) I have compiled a clutch of criteria to help my fellow students in forming their schedules. These criteria perhaps also apply to papers or complete theories, and as such I might be so bold as to suggest that even serious, proper linguists resort to them whenever evaluating a new idea hovering on the horizon. They were prepared with mainly phonology in mind, but should not be seen as restricted to any discipline. So, let me present to you:

1. If the teacher draws boxes on the blackboard, abandon course.
2. If the teacher warns you that association lines cannot cross, abandon course (perverts can stay).
3. If the students quarrel about the well-formedness of a particular utterance in their native tongue, abandon course.
4. If the students try to read aloud the examples in a language they cannot speak, abandon course.
5. If any of the students call a nonstandard dialectal version ‘wrong’, abandon course.
6. If the teacher does, you should probably stay.
7. If someone mentions Yawelmani, spring up and run.
8. If people dismiss a process as ‘post-lexical’, abandon course.
9. If someone quotes Baudouin de Courtenay in response to an engaging analysis of postverbal modifiers in Chaha, that is way too much interdisciplinary hilarity; abandon course.
10. If people make jokes about the bilabial-labiodental contrast of Ewe spirants during the coffee break, the scope is perhaps a tad constricted; abandon course.
11. If there are philosophy majors in the group (e.g. look for volumes of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus peeping out of shoulder bags), do not bother going in.
12. If an exemplar sentence contains the proper noun John, abandon course.
13. If an exemplar sentence contains the proper noun John and people drop sardonic remarks about it, abandon course.
14. If the teacher draws arrows on the blackboard, and the course is not diachronic linguistics, abandon course.
15. If the course is diachronic linguistics, flee.
16. If anybody mentions empty nuclei, stampede.
17. If anybody mentions empty nuclei and the course is diachronic linguistics, you are already too late.
18. If English is used as an example for some feature it contains only in traces (topic-comment structure, discourse particles, word-final devoicing, retroflexion), stroll away with an expression of contempt.
19. If the teacher calls OT ‘formal’, just leave.
20. If crocodiles are conscripted as examples, frolic.

	The Life And Death Of An Anonymous Verb—John Miaou
	Language Reveals Origins of Divinity—Michael Ramachendra
	SpecGram Vol CLIV, No 4 Contents