Academic colleagiality

Professor Francis Xavier Chomsky, Chairman of the Linguistics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the son of the world's foremost authority on cognitive theory Noam Chomsky, writes:

Dear Grammer Genious,

Here at the M.I.T. Linguistics Department we are completely overhauling the undergraduate curriculum, since we have all been totally gob-smacked by the recent appalling and paradigm-changing revelations that have turned the whole field of syntactic holistics and its effect on the gestalt-shift theory on its head.

As part of that overhaul, we are rewriting our undergraduate linguistics primer and its glossary. And logically, in light of your unparalleled knowledge of the field and your sterling reputation, we would very much like to incorporate your own definitions of certain terms, if you could be so kind. They are: a creole, a pidgin, a dialect, and a patois.

Thank you very much, in advance.

Incidentally, I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for kindly reviewing the draft of my planned journal piece, “Multi-Modal Evidence for Polyadic Ambiguities in Bi-Transitive Verbals of Puyallup Tlingit,” and for providing your cogent and insightful remarks in the margins, even though the manuscript is now water-stained and smells like bubble-bath powder. 

Yours collegially,

Francis Xavier Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Chair in Cognitive Theory and  Libertarian Socialism

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dear Francis,

First of all, here are your definitions.

A creole is a tomato, celery, onion, and bell pepper melange poured over rice, often with shrimp or other seafood added.

A pidgin is a kind of dirty gray bird that hangs around parks with statues in them.

A dialect is a kind of joke about people that you can tell they're dumb because they talk funny.

And a patois is a kind of fancy-schmancy potato soup (“patois” means potato in French) that French people usually eat right out of the refrigerator because they're too lazy to warm it up.

Incidentally, there is a kind of book that maybe you haven't heard of that you might think about accessing for your university library. It's called a dictionary.

And second of all,  Francis, it's nice to hear from you again because I have been meaning to return your handkerchief that you so kindly lent me when we went drinking together at Durty Nelly's in Cambridge that night after the Angela Merkel lecture and you spilled a whole bottle of DeKuyper's Apple Pie Schnapps down my pants and down that  sexy little doctoral candidate's cocktail dress and she dropped your iPhone into your Irish Car Bomb.

The Grammer Genious