A Neogrammarian wit
Sought fun on the side with a flit.
Through striving to nurture
Conditional merger,
Divorce was a second’ry split.
—Hester Fester-Münsterfenster
There once was a linguist emeritus,
In retirement obsessed with Herodotus,
With no fortune amassed
From his scholarly past,
He subsisted on beans and saleratus.
—Morris Swadesh III
There once was a mad syntactician,
Like Plato an academician.
Eschewing phonology,
He mastered dendrology—
What’s real’s form, the rest apparition.
—Pumptilian Perniquity
A lovelorn young student most frantic
Screamed out in his best Esperantic,
“Caj woh elj maj fuj
Y con sluj mi vol tuj!”
Now isn’t that simply romantic?
—P. Ublekkdeaux Meign
Said a miser who sordidly mised,
“My gold I have always despised;
I have stinged till I’m stingy,
And dinged till I’m dingy,
But it’s really the practice I’ve prized.”
—Anonymous, the Backformologist
A young linguist named Maudible
Who heard sounds inaudible—
Debunked by spectrogrammat-
ic evidence in Praat—
Was deemed totally fraudible.
—α-Betty Abū Gida
