Constructionuffs and Generafers

Found among the papers of André Maurois by Deak Kirkham

Noam and Adele were two adventurous linguists from America. One day, while out looking for new data, they came across a gap in a theory which led down to an underground world populated by two warring nations: the Constructionuffs and the Generafers. The Constructionuffs had developed a flexible but highly networked society, tolerant of change and open to adaptation whereas the Generafers had evolved a hierarchical, strict and categorical way of life underpinned by broad yet abstract values. Noam was whisked off on the sailboat La Minimaliste to Generasia whereas Adele was taken by train, El Constructiconador, to Constructionland.

Adele rapidly secured a leadership role for herself among the Constructionuffs while Noam was equally successful in rising quickly through the ranks of the Generafers. And this rise to prominence was serendipitous indeed for the Generafers and the Constructionuffs were on the verge of war over an island that lay between their two kingdoms, the island of Let Alone. The Generafers wanted not only to rename the island with abstract and semantically empty quasi-mathematical symbols with arrows showing exactly how to travel around the island, but also wished to divide the island into its constituent parts and treat each part separately. The Constructionuffs, by contrast, who signage-wise simply wanted to place some large X-s to denote significant aspects of the island, felt not only that the name of the island as Let Alone should indeed be left alone and that the island itself should remain not merely largely unanalysed and treated holistically, but also that the geography of the island should be used to reconfigure the topology of Constructionland itself. They had lined up three leading scientists, Charles, Paul and Mary to land on the island and bring back news of how it was laid out.

Well, Noam and Adele got to work publishing books and papers on the respective views of the island. So successful were they in this endeavour that the Generafers and the Constructionuffs decided to adopt those alternative views of the island and limit themselves to simply viewing the island, enjoying its mysteries and complexities, and abandoning their plans to adapt it.

All’s well that ends well, and Noam and Adele journeyed back to the surface. Although they had been underground for 10 months, only an hour had passed on the surface and they were both in time to teach their respective postgraduate syntax courses.

	The Lord of the Rings: A Fictlangy Ker-ching—Ronald R’Ron
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