Linguistic Humor

Off-beat Topics in Linguistics

I am constantly fascinated by the offbeat corners linguistics often drifts into. There are little bits and pieces of semi-collected linguistic humor on the net. In order to help collect them in one place, I offer the following collection. (Feel free to let me know what I'm missing!)

• The test case is, I suppose, A Contribution to the Repertory of Examples by Charles J. Fillmore. If you find this funny, you just might be a linguist. Or maybe you'll just find the other links here funny, too. Fillmore's piece comes from Studies Out In Left Field, the seminal work in linguistic humor.
• If you know a little linguistic theory, the writings of "Metalleus" are incredibly funny. If you don't know any theory, give it a shot anyway; you'll find them a little obscure but nevertheless amusing.
• Lisa Eckstein and I graduated from the same undergraduate department, though a few years apart, but I think her short story, Introduction to Syntax, may be of interest even to people who haven't been through an Introduction to Syntax class. (I didn't have Professor Robinson, myself.)
• Most people think the problem with playing Scrabble with a linguist is that linguists know too many words. But Peter Lasersohn knows the real reasons: in fact, he knows Ten Reasons Why Linguists Are a Pain to Play Scrabble With.
• Or perhaps all this language study seems divisive? You might be interested in one universal language. May we suggest Finnish as a World Language? (While on this site, the article was not written by me; I was simply tired of linking to it on the web, only to have the page disappear. This proposal also contains--with the spelling corrected--one of my favorite words, namely the Czech word for ice cream, zmrzlina.) If you're still feeling divisive, you can read the proposal in the semi-original Swedish. (It used to be available in German as well. Oddly enough, I never could find it in Finnish.)
• And, as a final sort of meta-meta-linguistic commentary, you can always try the writings of Chomsky (sort of).

And if you need something even more off-beat, may I recommend Rikchik?

My Own Less Serious Linguistics

But this page isn't just a collection of links. Dangerous though it may be to have it here during a job search....

First and foremost, of course, is Reflections on Optimality Theory. Not humorous, but not quite serious either, are some (rather old) thoughts on linguistics in science fiction. And then...

A linguist practical joke

An incredibly geeky phone prank which you can only get if you studied a little syntax. (If you haven't, ignore it or play along.)

Call the Gap. When the salesperson answers, ask them, "Hi, is Tracy there?" They will presumably tell you that there is no Tracy working at the store. Say, "What, no Trace?" When they say no, yell, "Hah! No Trace in the Gap! Chomsky was wrong!" and hang up.

(OK, it's not a very good prank. Note: if someone named Tracy comes to the phone, you can always yell "Trace can be heard in the Gap!" If they have someone there named Tracy, but she's mute, maybe you should have just asked for Heywood Jablome.)

A random linguistic Tom Swifty

"It's the down-carat semantic operator," Tom said intentionally.

Linguist poetry

Double Dactyls were invented by Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal. The basic rules, and some rather nice examples, can be found in Alex Chaffee's Double Dactyl collection. They're somewhere between limericks and sonnets in terms of restrictiveness, but resemble limericks in their obligatory but catchy rhythm and their typically whimsical nature.

(A note to the reader: Mark Johnson's Australian accent makes it such that both quoted words in the final line of the second double-dactyl are pronounced pretty close to identically--"pahz," more or less.)

More linguistic poetry, of sorts, can be made with Cascadilla Press's Magnetic Phonetics, a sort of IPA magnetic poetry set. I don't know why this amuses me so much.

Another dreadful (and pointless) linguistic pun

The LSA encourages linguists to use example sentences that do not include such violent (but clearly transitive) verbs as "kill" or "hit." Therefore, if one is discussing the diagnostics for the covert element PRO, one should avoid using a sentence such as

John wants [PRO to be killed]

but instead to use sentences like

John wants [PRO to be arrested]

While the LSA's guidelines are fairly recent, there is a sense in which this harkens back to the sixties, when this sort of thing was fairly common--that is, being arrested as part of a non-violent PRO-test.

Why all odd numbers are prime

You've probably seen how various professions prove that all odd numbers above 1 are prime. Usually you see something like:

• The mathematician says, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime--by induction, all odd numbers are prime!"
• The physicist says, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is, um, experimental error, 11 is prime, 13 is prime--looks good."
• The engineer says, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime..."
• And the computer scientist writes a program which prints out, "3 is prime, 3 is prime, 3 is prime..."

So what about linguists? Well...

• The phonologist says, "3 is prime; 5 is prime; 7 is prime. 9 doesn't look prime, but if we say it isn't we're missing an underlying generalization here."
• Some linguists, of course, say, "3 is prime. That ought to hold for all numbers, I think."
• Syntacticians say, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime. 9...9...yeah, I can get that to be prime."

I'm certain there are others. I don't think any of these are original to me--the last one I certainly heard from a certain syntactician.

Linguist pickup lines

But first, a caveat: I have never tried any of these lines. If you use them and get rejected, slapped, or lectured on how your style is as Minimalist as your syntax, it's not my fault and I take no responsibility.

• I'm doing some research into lexical semantics. Help me find out what 'happiness' means?
• You've heard of X-bar theory? Well, I've got the bar, and it's definitely rated X.
• Want to know why it's called "binding theory"?
• So, what's your theory on copulars?
• If you've got the Probe, I've got the Goal.

A few from my Why:

• Say, you know, linguists do it with tongues.
• I can say "Good morning" in 7 languages. Which should I use when I wake you up tomorrow?
• So, can I tell you about my deep and abiding research interest in body language?
• I've discovered an eighth universal facial expression, common to all cultures. Total ecstacy. Let me demonstrate.
• Is that a dangling participle, or are you just happy to see me?

(Editor's note: a "why" is the person your ex is currently seeing, because of course (i) "why" is one past "ex" and (ii) you can never quite help looking at them and thinking...well, you get the idea. However, this particular Why and I get along relatively well when not duelling with butter knives. Posted with his permission. Note that the Why is not a linguist himself.)

And a song that isn't mine at all

...so technically this should go at the top of the page, but it pretty much fits here.

I never had the chance to know Derek Gross, a linguist who died of cancer in 1996 or so. I know him only through his band, einstein's little homunculus, whose CD Don't Ask has a few songs he wrote or arranged and one with him singing. At any rate, Derek was also a linguist; he had been a graduate student at Rochester, I think.

The following song is from Memories of Derek on the elh website. The song was posted by Jennifer Arnold, who met Derek in 1991 at a Linguistics Summer Institute and played with him in a band called "The Floating Tones." The lyrics, as best she can make them out from her recording, are:

The Government-Binding Blues

Let me get past your surface structure, baby
Let me scope out your logical form
Let me check out your [unclear]
See if you deviate from the norm
Well I won't dominate you baby
If you won't govern me.
Well, if you didn't like my features then
Why did you parse my tree?