Things You Know You Didn’t Want to Know
(but, alas, they are actually true)
gathered at great personal risk of
melancholiolinguistic harm from actual editorial feelings
A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief
This month’s issue, sadly, marks the final installment of TYDKYDK which, for more than seven years, has collected students’ pearls of wisdom—all laboriously digitised by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira from hand-written papers. All those pearls of wisdom you have seen over the years are real, though students’ names have been withheld to protect the guilty.
We can try to put on a brave face against the sorrowful news. Think of the oft-repeated quip, “Don’t cry because the utterance ended, smile because it was grammatical.” Still, it’s not easy. There’s going to be a big empty space—admittedly with poorly-defined edges, a weak grasp of notation, and self-contradictory truth conditions, to be sure, but a big empty space nonetheless—in many, many issues to come.
I suppose a small silver lining is to be found by linguistics undergrads who have been following TYDKYDK during their brief academic careers and who live in entirely appropriate mortal fear of finding themselves—or even mere echoes thereof—amongst the cratered remains of linguistic knowledge each collection presents.
Taken as a whole, the congeries of all the things that none of us could have known we wouldn’t know provides a trenchant reminder of our own days as larval linguists. ’Tis a reminder that should engender some small sympathy for fresh-faced frosh in Ling 101, and a proper portion of pity for their put-upon professors.
