People GAA common folk, I mean GAA often approach me and say to me, “Dashing Rogue Linguist, we are intrigued by you and your fair science of Linguistics GAA comely Phonology, ravishing Morphology, and even gangly Syntax GAA but we do not fathom it at all. We are stupid GAA this we know GAA but still we cannot help but wonder … could you find it in your heart of hearts to teach us the Way of the Word?”
And I will tell them yes GAA yes, I have a place in my dapper Rogue’s heart for all of you simpletons, and I say to you now, as I have said to you ever before, gather round ye knobheads, and heed my words.
TODAY’S LESSON:
Morphology – the study and analysis of words and their lesser parts.
e.g. cunnilingus
Suppose we set as a task for ourselves the deconstruction and analysis of the word “cunnilingus,” which the OED (Oxford English Dictionary, for you most violently worthless of mash-brains) so authoritatively defines for us as:
cunn-i-lin-gus n. when you stick your tongue up a girl’s love slot
Now, of course, it should go without saying that the first step in a morphological analysis is to break up your target word into its constituent word parts, or “morphemes” as we in lofty academia call them. In this particular case, the “morpheme” that jumps out most prominently is “lingus” which as any schoolchum knows is simple Latin for “tongue.”
Continuing on from right-to-left we next encounter the letter “i.” And, you see, if there’s one thing those foppish dandies of ancient Rome were notorious for, it was sticking vowels in the middle of words for no particular reason. This, of course, is precisely the sort of thing that leads the great empires to ruination. Well, that and those damned aboriginal ingrates in India. If it weren’t for their sumptuous tea and elephant exports, surely the Queen would have wiped their miserable sort off the face of the British Earth by now. Why the Almighty saw fit to award tea and elephants to so shameful a race is beyond my dignified British cognition, and it burns me to the core. The point being, the letter “i” is just there for show, which leaves only “cunn.”
“Cunn,” then, is the tricky part. Even I, the seasoned Rogue Linguist, have never run across the morpheme “cunn” in all my travels. The best thing to do when you run into a morpheme you do not recognize is simply to work backwards from the fully-formed word. We know that the “-ilingus” part of “cunnilingus” means “tongue,” and if we merely glance back up at the OED definition, we can then apply the elementary arithmetic function of subtraction to deduce that “cunn” must therefore mean “when you stick your ______ up a girl’s love slot.” By Jove! Problem solved, and now at last we know that the ancient Romans had a word which meant “when you stick your ______ up a girl’s love slot.” Obviously this says a lot about Roman society, and we, linguists all of us, have left the academic world a little wiser than we found it.
But for the Rogue Linguist, is the job ever truly over? Surely not! One of language’s greatest powers, after all, is its potential to form new words at any given time. It’s called Change, sirs and madams, and it’s what got us where we are today. So then, armed with another glorious “morpheme” to call my own, I can devise new words for all sorts of vaginal insertions and violations, such as “cunnifist,” “cunnipotato,” and even a clever pun to the tune of “cunnilinguist.” In I go!
