Well, well, Father Christmas! I pause
To realise that you, of course,
Have a father and mother
Maybe sister and brother
Which I note in a relative Claus.
—Stu King-Filler
1066
Brown the waters; brown the rising prows;
Grey the water; grey the angry skies;
And grey the land around which heaves and sighs
As Harald’s hard and hardy army rows.
Still the silent waters as the bows
Of Norway’s ships cut through the thick dark flows,
Drawing the two Kings closer; neither knows
What futures fall—or who will win, or how.
He comes. And comes with stark words from the north,
Distant cousins to another speech
Long-settled in this land which now must reach
Beyond itself to prove its speakers’ worth.
South, the Norman Duke and army wait.
These are the tongues that shape this Island’s fate.
—Deak Kirkham
manual schmanual
prosody pedants pre-
scribe p-word prominence
projects from the feet
acrocinesiac
signers stress syllables
others eschew it suf-
fused with defeat
—Andrew Lamont
Of the relative pronouns, whereby
Is the one which I most often try
To drop in to chat
Wherever I’m at
Whereby no-one understands why.
—Y Hao-Wen
‘A little more than kin and less than kind’;
Open up a commentary, you’ll find
This has a triple linguistic meaning.
But with all this k-zy ShaKespearean punning
It also means that Hamlet’s lost his mind.
—Wiliie ’n’ Trey Xpiah
A Prison Officer in the
Syntax Jail Staff Cafeteria
I’ll just take a helping
On this cheap, standard-issue tin tray,
Of some morphosyntax.
At least it’ll be something to nibble at
While I walk around the compound.
—J. L. Bird
Sonnet 116(v2)
Let me not to the insight of true minds
Admit impediments. Syntax is not
Abstract autonomous algebra or what
Those diagrams of trees suggest: just lines.
Oh no! It is embedded in semantics
Emerges out of usage, carries meaning;
It wasn’t syntax at its own beginning
But is the fruit and daughter of pragmatics.
Don’t be a fool! Though Profs and PhDs
Draw clever diagrams up on a classroom screen
Like merge and move, not everyone agrees,
For some think forms are there to make things mean.
If this be error, a syntax violation,
These lexemes never were in combination.
—William Deakspeare
Godel cried ‘It’s incomplete!
No structure of maths can be neat.’
Yet lingo’s still stuck
(Though it’s sorted ducks ~ duck)
On the theory of things like foot ~ feet.
—Ian Cumm-Pleat, Thea Ramm
A Joy Cycle
Though joy may be ful,
or joy may be ous,
at the root it is joy all the same.
Ontologically speaking, their mandate is clear:
re ce is the name of the game.
—Morris Swadesh III
You say potato, I say pomme de terre;
You say stuff it; I say I don’t care.
But it isn’t just phraseology
Where a given ontic has two or three
Lingusiticisations. Consider with me
The shenanigans of morphology
Joyful and joyous appear to be
Examples of near synonymy.
So if you say joyous and I say joyful
Does that make ontology a load of bull?
—Joie de Vivre
“Joyous and joyful. Synonymy?”
No, Madam Linguist! You forget
Lexemes are caught in the lexeme net
Which are woven of multiplicity.
“A joyful or joyous event or occasion”
Granted, this may be so.
But “She feels so joyous”; “a joyous nation”
Joyful feels slightly more natural. Lo!
We conclude it’s all about collocation:
Semantics be damned; usage rules.
“Praise be to language,” we cry with elation
At this most amazing and joyousful news.
—Joy Phil
(with assistance (and help, support, input and guidance) from Joy Hearse)
