Lost Media: Linguistics Rock!

The SpecGram Media Elves™

In 1974, following the success of Schoolhouse Rock!, the independent production company Lingo Lango Longo released Linguistics Rock!, a linguistics-themed animated musical educational program similar in style to Schoolhouse Rock!. Unfortunately, the style, the branding, the episode titles, the characters, and the music were all very similar to Schoolhouse Rock!—so much so that Lingo Lango Longo’s Leado Lawyero, Leo Lombardo—in a stunning act of moral courage—pulled the plug on the whole enterprise before Lingo Lango Longo could be sued into oblivion.

All that remains of Linguistics Rock! is a single photo of a frozen moment of VCR playback, a handful of proposed episode titles, and a partial page of a script for an unnamed episode, presented below without further comment.

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• Schwa is a Magic Letter
• My Hero, Zero Copula
• Figure of Speech
• Naughty Number Agreement
• Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverb Particles Here
• I’m Just a Bilingual

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Every sentence that you read,

In an essay, book or ballad,

Has a structure and a plan,

It isn’t just word salad.

[animation shows leaves rising from a salad bowl to attach themselves onto a tree which then mutates into a phrase structure diagram]

Every word is a leaf on a syntax tree,

Grammatical complexity

Laid out so clear for all to see,

Come climbing down the syntax tree,

Come climbing down the syntax tree.

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	Further Studies in Multilingual Stimuli Incongruence—An Experimental Study Preregistration—Badkamer Schildpad Syrup
	The Evocative Case: New Data from Nahuatlepec de Santiago Ramón y Cajal—Adam Baker
	SpecGram Vol CXCV, No 3 Contents