Veritas
by Pocus Pisces
Linguistic thought’s been full of folks
Who’ve known the psych-real rules;
Each one is sure that he is right
And all the others—fools!
They’ve fought and quarreled and carried on
And argued lots about it
To prove that what they thought was true
So no one else would doubt it.
Deep structures, tagmemes, archiphones,
Case-grammar, “topic”, “focus”,
Phonology, semantic roles—
It’s all just hocus-pocus.
To the Field Workers,
to Make Much of Time
Gather ye data while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying.
Informants that can speak today
Tomorrow will be dying.
by Robert, Earl of Herrick
There once was an old syntactician
Whose theories had come to fruition
To describe any clause
He would shout without pause
“That’s a matter of simple addition.”
Edward Lear
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ḲelHā weṭei ʕaḲun kāhla
ḳaλai palhΛ-ḳΛ na wetā
śa da ʔa-ḳΛ ʔeja ʔālā
ja-ḳo pele ṭuba wete.
V.M. Illič
I am a cowboy in the boat of langue
—Ishmael Reed
I am a cowboy in the boat of langue
Sidewinders in the classroom
of fools
Bite my forehead.
Like, oh,
The untrustworthiness of
transformationalists
Who do not know their trips.
Who was that dog-faced linguist,
they asked,
The day I rode from town.
Professors with gingivitis cannot
see the light of truth.
Black Bart speaks Hittite in the
semantic field.
Wherefore ride, like a wolf at the
door, into the sunset.
We are tall, casting long shadows
As we fade to black.
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