I was walking across campus with a friend and we came upon half a dozen theoretical linguists committing unprovoked physical assault on a defenseless prescriptivist. My friend was shocked. She said: "Aren't you going to help?"
I said, "No; six should be enough."
All right, all right, this joke is a shameless, reprehensible ripoff, adapted from a fairly well known mother-in-law joke by comedian Peter Kay, with an ugly undertone of violence, and I should be ashamed of myself for telling it and I am. But I try to post one linguist joke a year, whether you need it or not (others are here and here, and I guess you could say also here, sort of), and they are not easy to come up with, and this is what I had on hand.
Anyway, if you smirked, let me just say... thank you for smirking. Hey, that would be a good film title.
Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at March 18, 2006 02:01 PM