Great Linguistics Movies and Their Famous Lines—Part I
The SpecGram Editorial Board
It’s surprising how many of today’s youth are unfamiliar with the Classics of Linguistic Film. And while these fickle youth are unlikely to actually take the time to watch—much less have the cultural sophistication necessary to appreciate—these films, perhaps they will gain something from acquainting themselves with their most important and oft-repeated lines.
Part II of the collection will be published in the next issue.
“Get your stinkin’ paws off me, you damn dirty Generativist!”
—Planet of the Generativists
“A Ling 101 TA once tried to test me. I ate his Broca’s Area with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
—The Silence of the Letters
“Houston, we have a phonology problem.”
—Homework 13
“One morning I shot an ambiguously attached prepositional phrase in my pajamas. How it got in my pajamas, I don’t know.”
—Animate Crackers
“See ya later, aspirator.”
—Flight of the Aspirator
“Phonebuzz...”
—iTizen Kane
“IPA? Where we’re going we don’t need IPA.”
—Back to the Future Tense
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack papers published in Klingon orthographic transcription. I watched c-commands glitter in the dark near the Tonguehauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like consonants in Ubykh. Time to die.”
—Tongue Blade Runner
“I bilabial trill in your general direction. Your mother was a functionalist and your father smelt of elatives.”
—Monty Pydgin and the Holy Grammarian
“ .”
—Aphonous 13
“Look, linguini tongue. This is my vowel space. This is your vowel space. I don’t go into yours, you don’t go into mine. You gotta hold the periphery.”
—Sloppy Chatting
“I talked to the woman in musical therapy, and she said that Chomsky’s the boy for you.”
—Verbtigo
“Troublemaking duo Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, posing as their industrious alter-egos, expose the people profiting from Hurricane Kakakatrina.”
—The Yes Men Affix the Aworld
“I do not think that cognate list means what you think it means.”
—The Physicist Bride
“Mr. Noam was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Explanatory Adequacy was something he couldn’t get, or something he lost.”
—Citizen Noam
“¡Hombre! ¿¿Tenemos una gallina en nuestra cápsula??”
—A Pollo 13
“That’s not a spectrograph. This is a spectrograph.”
—Creaky Voice Dundee
“I’m not bad. I’m just depicted in a moral and emotional context that makes me appear that way.”
—Who Framed Roger Rabbitive
“The greatest trick the null-morpheme ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. And like that—he’s gone.”
—The Uvular Suspects
“Listen, strange gnomes lying under cam-bridges transforming grammars is no basis for a theory of syntax.”
—Monty Pydgin and the Holy Grammarian
“Touch on, we have a phoneme.”
—appPhonos 13
“Some anthropologists feel like they don’t need linguistics. They work away quietly in remote huts, trying to solve problems of the past.”
—Into the Field
“Contralto... baritone... nix??”
—The Day My Vocal Cords Stood Still
“I am the ghost of data past. ... I am the ghost of data present. ... I am the ghost of data yet to come.”
—A Muppets Christmas Funding
“Pathetic linguists. Hurling your models into the discourse without the slightest inkling of who or what is out there. If you had known anything about the true nature of communication, anything at all, you would have abstracted away from it in terror.”
—Flash Analyst
“Inconceivable!”
“You keep using that word. I do not think that expression bears the semantic denotation relationship to objects in the world that you think it does.”
—The Principles and Parameters Bride
“Aisle Bee Bach!”
—The Homophonator
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a dental stop.”
—Gone with the Aspiration
“You know how to make a labial ingressive, don’t you, Steve? You put your lips together and you suck.”
—To Click and Click Not
“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You caricature my accent. Prepare to die.”
—The Prescriptivist Bride
“There’s no crying in phonology!”
—A Class of Their Own
