A Deep Linguistic Mystery
І.М. Вікторія “Вік” Тетяӕмәтяіх
As for my friends and family
The deep linguistic mystery
That’s most entailed by all my work
Is, Is she lit’rally a jerk?
They think I hide what ’tis I do,
And make up tales that just aren’t true.
When I expound with jargon terms
Their eyes glaze o’er; they writhe like worms
Who’re drowning in a boredom rain,
While mutt’ring, “Oh no! Not again!”
Unblushing, hopeful, undeterred,
Come torrents of my fav’rite words:
Decategorialization
Of word-sense disambiguation,
An interjection’s strong inflection,
Some introspective self-correction,
A native-speaker’s intuition
On second-language acquisition,
A little pinch of lat’ral plosion,
A smidgen of the verbs of motion,
Recursive, dírect illocutions
In complement’ry distributions,
Or buff’lo to the nth degree—
This lingo all makes sense to me!
I ’splain how /h/ and /ŋ/ make /ꜧ/
(So obvious!) and thus why—when
Linguistic’lly significánt—
A generalization shan’t
Escape! It must be captured, snug
And safe, adored, much like a wug.
I cannot speak more plainly, folks—
These words are real, and not a hoax.
Though none believe I’ve noȝt to hide,
At least I can assert, “I tried.”
