Rather than promise nothing but unicorns and rainbows, we’ve searched far and wide—in faculty lounges and grad library carrels, in cushy academic conferences and privative fieldwork conditions—to uncover the reasons people give for being fed up with their particular linguistic and linguistics-adjacent field.

So, enjoy Part II of our series on reasons not to study linguistics—or don’t.

• Don’t do sociolinguistics. You’ll never pay off the bar tab.
• “Is a bad Quine to study” is a bad Quine to study.
• Don’t study comparative grammar; there’s so many better things to look at.
• Don’t study linguification; in fact, that word shouldn’t even be in your dictionary.
• Don’t read Saussure; it’s all arbitrary.
• Studying hapax legomena will leave you slæpwerigne.
• Every student shouldn’t study five quantifier ambiguities.
• Never try to write a triolet,
  With all its complications; you had better
  Stick to “rose is red, and blue is violet.”
  Never try to write a triolet,
  Or even say the name: you’ll sigh “No way!”
  Not sure the final T’s a silent letter.
  Never try to write a triolet,
  —darn, repeating the second line doesn’t work here! I give up.
• Should you study yes/no questions? No.
• Abandon all hope ye who study medieval Italian poetry.
• Don’t study non-linguistic, visceral vocalisations; they’ll make you scream, cry, or grunt.
• Don’t study morphophonology; it’s no phun at all, my phriend.
• We will remember the language of World War I for evermore.
• Don’t study subliminal messaging because NATAS LIAH.
• Corpus linguistics is highly insignificant.
• Most people don’t like studying mid-90s pop-rock lyrics; but if it makes you happy, then it can’t be that bad.
• You shouldn’t—in fact you mustn’t—study modal verbs—but you can if you dare.
• Don’t study poetics; it’s just for eclectics.
• Don’t study rhyme; you’ll have a hell of a time.
• Don’t study half-rhyme; it’s too tame.
• You shouldn’t study scope ambiguities because they’re difficult.
• Don’t study X-bar syntax; it’ll project all your extended fears to the maximal level.
• Don’t analyze astronomical jargon; it isn’t Sirius.
• Don’t do typology; with greater than chance frequency typologists lose the ability to say anything definite.
• Don’t study phonetic ambiguity; it’s no way to earn your Yannies.
• Don’t study Greek; it’s all Greek to me.
• Don’t study the glottal stop; it just gets stuck in your throat.
• One should never study the use of ... ellipsis, vaguely described thingamajigs, and the Oxford comma.
• Don’t study mythology; it’s all made up.
• Don’t study ventriloquism; at least, that’s what my puppet told me.
• Don’t study onomatopoeia; it will make you whimper, sigh, and yawn.
• X-bar linguistics is only for AA members.
• Don’t read too much Chom(p)sky; there’s too much to get your teeth into.
• Don’t do functional syntax; you’ll have to give up your principles.
• Etymology bugs me. Oh hold on...
• Don’t do stylistics; it’s neither chic nor cool.
• Don’t study evolutionary linguistics; you won’t know where to begin.
• Remember to never study split infinitives.
• Dyspepsia Prater,
  Said “Nice list, see you later!”
  But you shouldn’t attempt to write clerihews,
  Because there’s no strict limits on meter but you have to work in an end rhyme somehow and that’s surprisingly hard to do.
  
  

More to come...