From the Department of Cheap Research: Melnick’s Thesis—Woody Ellen SpecGram Vol CLV, No 3 Contents A Poetic Meditation on English Spelling Rules and Reform For Two Contrasting Voices—Eysp L. Kore-Eckly

How They Do It In Linguistics

James Crippen

Sociolinguists do it with variety.
Phonologists do it with deviation.
Professors do it for tenure.
Psycholinguists do it with reliable effects.
Theorists do it in armchairs.
Field linguists do it with the whole village.
Cognitivists do it with mental imagery.
Acquisitionists do it with families.
L2 acquisitionists do it in classrooms.
Computationalists do it with corpora.
Generativists do it with bindings. (Recursively!)
Typologists do it with everyone.
Comparativists do it the longest.
Creolists do it in colonies.
Grad students do it for the experience.
Phoneticians do it in booths.

Comparativists do it over millennia.
Syntacticians do it with trees.
Semanticians do it with meaning.
Morphologists do it in pieces.
Neurolinguists do it with magnets.
Documentationists do it for the record.
OTists do it with strict domination.
Evolutionists do it with primates.
Archivists make it last forever.
Experimentalists do it repeatedly.
Speech pathologists do it oddly.
Revitalizationists do it with elders.
Linguistic anthropologists do it in context.
Austronesianists do it over half the world.
Polynesianists do it in outriggers.
Grant reviewers only read about it.

From the Department of Cheap Research: Melnick’s Thesis—Woody Ellen
A Poetic Meditation on English Spelling Rules and Reform For Two Contrasting Voices—Eysp L. Kore-Eckly
SpecGram Vol CLV, No 3 Contents