In an effort to better understand how linguistics departments work at different universities, SpecGram has obtained an excerpt of the minutes of a recent department meeting. Names have been changed to protect the innocent (assuming there is one), though a competent Googler could Bing that information on the first try on DuckDuckGo.
Vartabedian: Good afternoon, everyone. Prof. Robertson is unavailable. As Vice-
Anderson: I changed the Philosophy Department sign to say “Philology Department”.
Vartabedian: That’s not a prank. It makes them look like they do reputable work, comparatively. They haven’t even taken down the sign.
Williams: The Artificial Intelligence Lab is running a conference on large language models. We replaced their posters with ones having pictures of Profs. Nagy and Grossman.
Vartabedian: Indeed, there’s... um... a lot of them to love.
Nagy: You could stand to spend a bit more time on the euphemism treadmill yourself, bud.
Grossman: I blame nominative determinism.
Vartabedian: What was embarrassing was that they managed to get an AI-generated manuscript published in our university linguistics journal. You were the referee, Prof. Grossman, what were you thinking?
Grossman: Their article was more readable than anything you’ve ever written.
Vartabedian: Moving on... O’Connor, I see that you put up a sign at the College of Pharmacy that says “just a bunch of prescriptivists”.
O’Connor: I ain’t listening to those pill counters tell me what I can and can’t drink grapefruit juice with. Or whether “ain’t” is a word. It am.
Vartabedian: The Political Science Department pranked us by getting a bunch of neo-
Anderson: Or you could call it the Center for Caucasian Studies! No, wait...
Kapanadze: I’ll be in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Svan.
Turmanidze: Prof. Robertson and I retaliated by adding quotes around Political “Science” on their big sign along with the slogan “Putting the ‘moron’ in ‘oxymoron’ ”. They proved us right when they graffitied our building with “Grammer Nazi’s” [sic] and associated symbology.
Vartabedian: That attracted an even larger crowd of people whose, um, enthusiasm exceeds their intelligence.
Kapanadze: With many of the same faces as before.
Turmanidze: As well as a few very confused Frasier fans.
Anderson: I never got that show.
Vartabedian: Anyway, I reminded Prof. Robertson that the Political Science Department has a lot of very powerful friends, but he had to go and try to get them on a hate-
Muller: But I’ve been looking forward all year to seeing that special museum exhibit on local greetings from the Middle Ages to the present!
Vartabedian: Yes, we’re all disappointed to miss the Moien Âge exhibit.
Easton: As for me, I had planned to go to the nuclear reactor with a map of Onset, Massachusetts and a music score with a coda.
Vartabedian: That sounds lame.
Easton: That’s exactly what Prof. Robertson said as he rushed to join me. Well, maybe not “rushed”...
Williams: When it came to selecting the large models for the AI poster, he was a runner-up, or maybe a “walker-
Nagy: No, he always takes the elevator, like me.
Grossman: Not at the same time. You can’t both fit.
Easton: He brought a snack and his brand-
Anderson: Don’t spoil it for me! I still have 1500 pages to go in Big Al’s Big-
Easton: So he sawed out the chapter on evidentials...
Anderson: I said no spoilers!
Easton: ...and inserted it into the beam, creating a new metastable particle that can only exist in a shadowy superposition between epistemic certainty and alethic falsehood. He was so excited he knocked his toast into the beam. I said, “It always lands buttered-
All but Anderson and Easton: Too late!
Easton: ...we barely made it out of the building in time.
Anderson: Too late!
Vartabedian: Too late, Anderson. So that would explain why those nice gentlemen from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cordoned off Albany Street. Next?
Peterson: Prof. Robertson and I went over to the Chemistry Department and messed with their giant periodic table. We relabelled a bunch of their elements to ling terms: Nounium, Verbium, Berkelium in honor of the linguistics department at Berkeley...
Vartabedian: I’m pretty sure one of those is real.
Williams: It’s the one named after Yttverby. She’s a Swedish sociolinguist at Berkeley.
Peterson: While we were over there Prof. Robertson thought it would be fun to synthesize some Ra-Sm-
Turmanidze: That whole block smelled like tossed salad and scrambled eggs.
Easton: Where did you get your hands on that much radium? Or uranium? Or semanticum?
Vartabedian: That would explain why those nice gentlemen from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cordoned off the chemistry building.
Williams: It’s fortunate they were already nearby.
Favreau: Prof. Robertson and I hung signs with words and phrasal categories on the gigantic oak outside the biology building to turn it into a syntax tree.
Vartabedian: That part was clever, but as for what followed...
Favreau: I asked Prof. Robertson how he would illustrate wh-movement, and you know how he always carries that chainsaw around with him?
Easton: I can hardly picture him without it any more.
Vartabedian: I was interviewed for the article in the campus newspaper. Unfortunately, the editor didn’t go with my suggested headline of “Bio Building Gets Unexpected New Skylight”.
Favreau: Apparently, “BSL-3” doesn’t mean that the lab teaches British Sign Language.
Nagy: Even we have only two British Sign Language labs.
Newman: That’s the first I’ve heard of them, but I just joined this department two years ago.
Nagy: They’re much quieter than Professor Kapanadze‘s lab, what with all their ejectives.
Newman: Tell me about it! I’d like to eject Professor Kapanadze from the office next door. He’s a loud snorer.
Grossman: He must have been reviewing one of Professor Vartabedian‘s papers.
Vartabedian: Anyway, I think we now know why those nice gentlemen from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cordoned off Ames Street.
Williams: If only the biology building were a little closer to the chemistry building...
Vartabedian: All in all, there were some wins and losses, but it was a pretty good prank week. Let’s move on to item two on the agenda: the department bake sale. Did we make enough money to cover Prof. Robertson’s bail?
This appears to be the best-