There once was a teacher from Rome
Who spoke poorly of changes at home:
“Vetulus non veclus,
Oculus non oclus”;
Much info’s been gleaned from this tome.
—Arcadia Arcadopoulou
Prescriptivists love nothing fewer
Then running over fee held and moo-er
To baldly split infinite ifs
And getting into endless .tiffs
Descriptivists on th’other hand
Are a rather defer-ent band.
They will not tell Watt to-do
But rather spend thyme watching ewe.
Linguists say they are at home
With the latter as a rule
But twitch when people think it’s cool
To play around with homophones.
—Col. O. Nihilist
The Historical Phonologist
All day, the philologist reads
Worn tomes about ancient pet peeves.
By leafing through piles
Of screeds he compiles,
The phonemes of old he retrieves.
—Luca Dinu
a bird in the bush is worth shruggin’,
but one in the hand earns a smug grin.
its value is double,
but a plural is trouble:
one wug plus one wug is two ______
—Andrew Lamont
The life of a couple named Bement
Was sullied by rows quite vehement.
To make peace, lad and lass
Took a linguistics class
Where they both studied gender agreement.
—Pete Bleackley
This little haiku
Recently irrealis
Is now in my mind and yours
—Morris Swadesh III
Modulo schmodulo
So say prescriptivists
Pulling grammatical
Rules from their ass
But because language change
Incontrovertibly
Nonprepositional
Words join the class
—W. Dak Tyll
