The Words of the Prophets Are Written on the Restroom Walls...

Art Paul and Simon Garfunkel
X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies

We here at the X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies pride ourselves on the well-above-average level of discourse that takes place in our hallowed halls. It turns out that a well-above-average level of discourse also takes place in our bathroom stalls. Below we’ve collected a small sampling of the overly educated graffiti that has appeared in the Little Linguists’ Room outside Linguistic Collaborative Space #34b in our secondary satellite office in Seattle.

• A language whose word for ‘interpreter’ is incredibly hard to say is probably trying to tell you something.

• If grammars really exist in an abstract Platonic space, all the jobs involving studying them will be there too.

• Fieldwork pays for itself—but it doesn’t pay for food, clothing, shelter, medical care, transportation, or incidentals.

• Any dataset that is “reconstructed” will miraculously give results that agree with the researcher’s predictions.

• He who laughs last was trying to create a theoretical framework in which the joke can be analysed as an example of extempore speech.

• If you study a language spoken in a place with bad weather, no one will ever check your data.

• Learning about languages doesn’t help you speak them well, but learning an awful lot about them can help you speak them particularly badly.

• Never offend the department secretary. S/he is more essential to your success than anyone else, including the department chair.

• Any theory with a name that begins with a prefix is automatically wrong. Double-prefixes mean doubly wrong.

• Never define your core terms precisely; you want to have a way not to be wrong when it turns out later that you were wrong.

• In the end, more people will read drunk scrawls on the wall of a toilet cubicle than will read the average thesis on Finno-Ugric.
  • If you are a classicist, you can probably get a paper out of drunk scrawls on the walls of toilet cubicles, provided they’re in Pompeii.
    • That’s not the kind of paper that “toilet cubicles” brings to mind...

• Papers offering a “[sexy buzzadjective] perspective on [well-known phenomenon]” will always say that there is only one useful way of analyzing said phenomenon.

• The only real descriptivism and prescriptivism is that prescriptivists say everyone else is wrong and descriptivists like to tell you how and why they are wrong.

• Functional heads are neither.

• Extra-metricality is the balm that soothes the heart of an unruly phonotactics. And you can get it in bulk.

• In the end, your department finance office will have more effect on your results than your informants.

• Philologists always get the last laugh, but it can take them awhile.

• If your theory is susceptible to counter-evidence, you’re not being Copernican enough.

• There is no facet of usage so small that a sufficiently insecure person can’t rant about it.

• There are two valid reasons for using Greek letters in a linguistics article: your paper is on Greek, or your audience thinks science smells like magic.

• Research will only end when people stop asking questions.

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	SpecGram Vol CLXXXII, No 2 Contents