/nuz baɪts/

Not a wire news service but still more reliable than most newspapers.

Linguists Admit English Orthography is Just Plain Weird

In the light of documents released exclusively to SpecGram via trusted intermediaries (thanks, grad students—the pizza is in the mail), linguists studying English have been forced to publicly admit that its orthography is simply odd.

“All that guff about etymology and Akkadian roots was all a big sham,” said Prof Simon Saez of High Cough University. “Look, anyone who tries to explain the house/houses vs. mouse/mice thing by appealing to German is just having a laff.”

In a tearful interview in front of the world’s linguistic press (all three of us!), he also admitted that “The Great Vowel Shift” was a hoax cooked up by graduate students after a particularly bad takeaway and its rather painfully constricting after-effects.

It is thought that several textbooks will need to be rewritten and at least a handful of linguists and blokes in pubs will feel less smug in the light of these shocking revelations.

	Linguimericks, Etc.—Book ५०
	Be a Linguistics Survivor—Out-Think. Out-Publish. ... Out Cold.—J. Probst and X. Pedition Robinson
	SpecGram Vol CLXXXI, No 3 Contents