Proverbial Wisdom
The SpecGram
Apophthegmatical Elves™
At Speculative Grammarian, we have a long history of helping people in their linguistic careers, from providing our guide to such careers, to promoting soundtracks, even to showing the greatest linguistics films.
After six of our interns broke loose and ended up on a linguistic archaeology site, we allowed them back into the building on the proviso that they shared their findings with us. We were astonished to discover that they had brought with them many ancient proverbs, overflowing with linguistic wisdom. These are collected below.
- There are seven things every great linguist needs: a great idea; time to think; an office of your own; fawning fans; funding; the ability to count.
- Clicks and clacks may block my tract, but semes will never hurt me.
- If you can’t stand the heat, study an Inuit language.
- Don’t let your pet peeves run wild, or they will become your owner peeves.
- The pen is mightier than the... actually, maybe it was a bad idea to disturb these natives after all.
- Wash your mouth out with soap and water before giving the workshop on the articulation of ejectives.
- Ask not what your language can do for you—ask what you can do for your language.
- One man’s trash is another man’s theory.
- Don’t be a stagnant pronoun; be an ambitious proverb.
- Read my lips: I’m a lip-reader.
- When obstruent people get in your way, gather your plosives and eject them away.
- If people were meant to be linguists, linguistics wouldn’t be sin-chronic and die-achronic.
- There are two ways: one leads to fame, fans, and fortune; the other leads to writing books on English linguistics.
- There’s no such thing as a free lunch, so stuff your face with cookies at the department coffee break.
- Money does not grow on parse trees.
- A syntactic chain is only as strong as the weakest student’s understanding of movement rules.
- A picture is worth a thousand words, but 100 pictures do not a thesis make.
- The early modern English byrde catcheth the wurmme.
- There’s no fool like an old theorist.
- The grass is always greener on the side of the fence where they speak a language with more than three basic color terms.
- One man’s “meat” is another man’s [mi:ʔ].
- When in Rome, best try to speak some Italian.
- Sleep is temporary; tenure is forever.
- If you learn about wanna contraction, you gotta get with my friends.
- Curiosity killed the cat; theatricality killed the stage performer; frivolity killed the lawyer; and Chomsky and Halle’s analysis of -ity killed the undergraduate student’s interest in linguistics.
- A cat has nine lives—but only three phonemes.
- Two’s company; three’s a trial.
- “The harder you work, the luckier you get” is an example of the “the X-er, the Y-er” construction.
- Mind your tongue—but you’ll never be an articulatory phonetician.
- Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched and don’t count your furniture because it’s uncountable.
- Good things come in small particles.
- Where there’s a will, shall, may, can, or might, there’s a modal auxiliary verb.
- Two lexical heads are better than one.
- Don’t judge a linguistics book by its cover—unless it’s by Chomsky in which case, probably don’t bother.
- Don’t talk the talk if you can’t pronounce the phonemes.
- The length of your thesis is inversely proportional to the probability it will ever be read.
- Words of a feather decline together.
- If a book is published and no-one reads it, is it still an academic output?
- The smaller the language you’re working on, the smaller the chance someone will find a flaw in your research.
- The word on the street is... often uttered in a highly colloquial register rich in phonetic processes that distinguish it from the citation form.
- There’s no tense-aspect form like the present perfect.
- Discretion is the noun form of discrete.
- You cannot make a Kentish omelette without breaking a few eyren.
- You’re never too old to learn, but you’re already too old to become fluent.
- If your language has no diphthongs, never say die.
- The best things in life are in free variation.
- Once bitten, twice regretting not getting that yellow fever vaccine they recommended.
- A grammar in the hand is worth two in the library.
- Noam wasn’t read in a day.
- An informant in the lab is worth two in the bush.
- You can’t see the auxiliary would for the syntactic trees.
- The Old English masculine declension: it kills two words with one stān.
- Noman is an island (in its genitive form), and they spoke an Algonquian language there.
- Stop, in the name of [p, b, t, d, k, g], etc.
- Hope for the best, prepare for the generative grammar pop quiz.
- A taste of allophony is a dangerous thing.
- An umlaut cannot change its spots.
- All work and no play made Jackendoff a prize-winning researcher.
- Time and tide (and other pairs of diachronically related synonyms like ship and skip) wait for no one.
- Possession is nine-tenths of the genitive.
- If you can talk in linguistese, you will graduate with ease.
- A word in the mouth is worth two abstract lexical representations in the mind.
- The dangling modifier never falls far from the tree.
- Give them a morpheme and they’ll take a clause.
- Behind every successful man there stands a multitude of graduate students.
- When the going gets tough-movement, the weaker students fail the syntax exam.
- Three can keep a secret if two don’t speak your language.
- Don’t stick your nose into non-nasal sounds.
- If it ain’t broke, analyze it.
- A journey of a thousand tongues starts with a single phone.
- Truth is stranger than fiction. Linguistic truths are stranger than science fiction.
- It’s the [i:]conomy ~ [ə]conomy free variation phenomenon, stupid.
- In the beginning was the word. Then the phraseme, then the syntactically complex headed phrase, and finally interclausal syntactically constrained wh- movement.
- Optional copula deletion: it what it is.
- Ask not what your advisor can do for you; ask what you can do for your advisor.
- Actions speak louder than words, and speakers with greater lung capacity speak louder than those with small lung capacity.
- It is the last counterexample that breaks the theory’s back.
- He who hesitates is a high-considerateness speaker.
- Etymology: You can’t get there from here.
- Be like the schwa: never stressed.
- The first rule of aphasic fight club is you don’t talk about aphasic fight club.
- Having practiced makes perfect.
