Lord of the Rhymes—Deedles D’Dee SpecGram Vol CXCII, No 1 Contents Some Features of Arxiflbptlscfl—Trent Slater

Overheard* in the Linguistics Student Lounge

Chesterton “T͡ʃazː” Wilburfors Gilchrist, IV
Grad Student Union Steward, United Linguistics Workers**
Second-Year Grad Student, Dept. of Lexicology and Glottometrics
Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton

All names have been changed to protect the guilty innocent.

Preterite: I’m scared of Welsh basic colour terms. They’re gruesome.
Verbigeration: I’m more of a glas half full person, but Welsh colour terms fill others with melyncholy. It’s a no-gwyn situation.
Metalwork: Whaddya got agin Gwin?
Jargonisation: I’m scared of Danish numbers.
Preterite: Tussen­voegsel has told me that modern Welsh does distinguish between green and blue.
Transitively: It is perfectly on brand to use outdated linguistic data, so it’s all good.
Jargonisation: If everyone had to use recent data, we’d never get twenty-year theory arguments.
Metalwork: You may be eaten by a grue.

More to come...


* My Grandpapá—Chesterton Wilburfors Gilchrist, Jr., the esteemed Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Lexicology and Glottometrics at Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton—impressed upon me from an early age the potentially career-making value of eavesdropping serendipitous fieldwork.

Despite the protests of his esteemed colleague H.D. Onesimus that all fieldwork is inherently corrupting, Grandpapá felt that one owed it to big-L Linguistics to engage in fieldwork. However, further inspired by his equally esteemed but even more prudent colleague Athanasious Schadenpoodle, Grandpapá found it best to do his fieldwork in the linguistics student lounge, where we keep the comparatively linguistically naïve speakers, and where surströmming, American politicians, Swiss warlords, and French pop music are all expressly forbidden.

The tiniest sliver of Grandpapá’s most illustrious works might include “Unwittingly Postmodern Arguments Against Postmodernism Among Ideological Ingénues” (1969), “Biunique Binarization of Bivalent Bilateral Bilabials by Bilingual Bicentennialist Bicyclists” (1976), “Ungood Doublethink and Newspeak in the Perpetual War Against Linguistic Relativity” (1984), “On the Circum­anti­post­de­in­frikkin­fix­ational­ism­fix” (1998), “Reanalysis of Spanish by Naïve Linguists” (2008), “Je suis /hoze/” (2009), “To Odyssey Two, Too” (2010), and “Oldsters Say the Darnedest Things” (forthcoming)—all based on data gathered through such eavesdropping serendipitous fieldwork.

Admittedly, I am not—yet!—the eavesdropper serendipitous fieldworker my Grandpapá is, and I don’t—yet!—have his ear for finding meaningfully meaningful meaning in overheard conversations, but as Stalin probably didn’t say—yet!—“Quantity has a quality all its own!” So I will keep publishing the plagiarized words stolen conversations misappropriated exchanges data of my victims marks pawns informants until I, too, make bank like Grandpapá hit the academic big time get tenure make an important contribution to linguistics!

** This Research is gratefully sponsored by the ULŋW Local #1729.

Lord of the Rhymes—Deedles D’Dee
Some Features of Arxiflbptlscfl—Trent Slater
SpecGram Vol CXCII, No 1 Contents