1001 Ways to
Troll Linguists
—A Fragment
Discovered by
R. Key O’Logist &
Pei-Li O’Logist
During one of our regular digs in MIT midden 32-D808, we discovered a coffee-soaked manuscript by a now unknown author. This radical manuscript would certainly have revolutionized the entire field of linguistics, if it had survived whole. Unfortunately, only fragments remain—the rest of the originally quite intact manuscript having been destroyed by caffeine-starved graduate students working on the dig; they repeatedly pressed their donuts—cake donuts, no less!—firmly but not gently against the manuscript in an attempt to extract even a millimicrohemidemisemitasse of fossilized black gold from it. Once they had been driven off, 99% of the document was lost. That which remains is presented below for your edification and inspiration.
...
17) Score some pieces of slate with a sharp stick and try to convince some historical linguists that it is actually proto-Sumerian.
...
142) Argue for English to be seen as a Tibeto-Burman language on the basis of that old Burmashave™ advert.
...
201) Invent an entirely new linguistic theory then leave the field to become a political commentator.
...
313) Apply for funding for fieldwork to research taboos and the language of mourning in the city of South Park, Cartmanandstan.
314) Create a corpus of English linguistics example sentences, redirect links to the BNC to your corpus. Act amazed when new research on English usage comes out.
...
375) Act appalled when anyone in your department talks about “dangling modifiers.” Turn red and shuffle away mumbling about rudeness.
...
405) Announce that you have disproved UG using field evidence from a conlang you made.
406) Push for equal language rights for native speakers of your conlang.
...
788) Offer to present a paper on “A Historico-Comparative Study of C and C#” at an LSA conference. File legal papers when it is rejected as programming languages are not “languages”.
789) Offer to present a paper for historical sociolinguists on the development of modern creoles like Python and Java from such early pidgins as COBOL and Fortran, explaining how their phrase-structure rules demonstrate the deeply deficient form of UG possessed by computers and their programmers. (Extra points for submitting same to a computer science conference.)
...
799) Write a treatise parsing the words “and” and “but” as markers of politico-religious discourse.
...
899) Market a brand-new translation theory that is superior to all others as it has a trichotomy, rather than a dichotomy.
900) Create a prescriptive translation theory that requires all translators to create texts that look foreign and strange. Call anyone who refuses to go along a shill for the corporatist oppressors.
...
1001) If called on your trolling, point out that linguists get generally much more exercised by gnomes than trolls.
FIN
