Friday, April 01, 2011

I love my life as a Linguist (a gentle autobiographical sketch)

Got on the train from Derbyshire
Moooved down to a Cambridge home
Got a moustache and an ill-kept beard
Some research papers and a syntax tome
Marking work with a ballpoint pen
There is just one thing in my FLN
I like Merge
We all like Merge

Teaching Middle English for an insufficient fee
Acting like a prof although I have no PhD
I remember when the kids at school would laugh at me
Now I'm analysing their CP
woah o o...

(chorus)
I love my life as a Linguist
All my friends are Linguists too
Come with me let's be Linguists
Haven't you heard? Being a Linguist's cool
Being a Linguist's cool
Being a Linguist's cool
Being a Linguist's cool cool cooool

CorpusSearch app on my laptop
Running queries on Old Norse prose
Present the results at a workshop
Yawning faces in ordered rows
Coolest kids at the training day
Attendance list, look there's my name
I turned up
You didn't turn up

Never take a plastic bag, I always use my own
Plugging in my laptop at the library down the road
Say I'm getting funding but it's really pretty low
I'm the coolest guy you'll ever know
woah o o...

(chorus)
I love my life as a Linguist
All my friends are Linguists too
Come with me let's be Linguists
Haven't you heard? Being a Linguist's cool
Being a Linguist's cool
Being a Linguist's cool
Being a Linguist's cool cool cooool

Ale with pub ice cream
Cartography meets DM vP
Indeterminate theoretical preference
Something retro in my analysis

"Basically I'm a part-time webmaster; I also help design a magazine where all the articles are in different languages."

"I go to syntax pub nights."

"Er, yeah, I once stage-managed a Shakespeare play in a converted bread-oven in Switzerland?"

If that lot doesn't make me a dickhead (in the traditional sense of the word), I don't know what would. Apologies to TheGrandSpectacular, whose original version is superior in every way.

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