The Academic Conference from Hell
The 38th International Symposium on Linguistic Theory and Application was proceeding as expected: with polite backstabbing, veiled insults disguised as "engaging discussion," and the subtle war of PowerPoint animations. That was until the keynote session, when the scheduled speaker—an esteemed if uninspiring figure—was unceremoniously shoved off stage by a man in a tweed blazer and the unmistakable gleam of academic bloodlust in his eyes.
The slide on the screen read, in stark Arial Black:
“WHY EVERYONE IN THIS ROOM IS WRONG”
The audience let out a collective murmur of indignation. Someone in the front row gasped. A computational linguist reached for his asthma inhaler.
The interloper adjusted his tie, clicked his laser pointer, and launched into what could only be described as an intellectual massacre.
The Dismantling Begins
“With respect,” he began, in a tone that suggested he had none, “let’s start with Chomsky.”
The entire generativist section of the audience bristled. “You mean—”
“I mean everything.” A new slide appeared: a stock image of a toddler crying with the caption ‘Poverty of the Stimulus? Try Poverty of the Argument’.
A murmur of rage spread through the room. A young syntactician shot to his feet. “But UG—”
The presenter clicked again. A graph materialised, demonstrating with overwhelming visual clarity that the argument had been debunked fifteen times over by people who were, in his words, “bored and had twenty minutes to spare.”
Before anyone could recover, he pivoted. “Functionalists,” he said, turning to the other half of the audience. “You thought you were safe?”
The Hallidayans collectively clenched their jaws.
The next slide: a blurry JPEG of a Christmas turkey with the words “STRATA: THE GRAVY OF LINGUISTICS”.
An emeritus professor clutched his chest. Someone in the back whispered, “This is murder.”
The presenter smirked. “If a system is too complex to be falsified, is it really a system, or just an elaborate way to avoid being proven wrong?”
The functionalists tried to protest, but their cries were met with pre-planned counters, deployed with the surgical precision of a sniper who had been waiting years for this moment.
Desperate Resistance
A brave psycholinguist attempted to derail him by questioning his methodology.
“Interesting,” the presenter said, clicking his remote. A pie chart appeared, showing that 78% of psycholinguistic experiments were, in his words, “badly disguised guessing games”.
“You can’t just—” the psycholinguist spluttered.
He could. And he did.
The room was in chaos now. Chairs scraped against the floor as people stood, shouting, trying to mount defences. But for every protest, the rogue presenter had a slide, a graph, a meme, or—worst of all—an irrefutable passive-aggressive rhetorical question.
Then came the final slide:
“Syntax is just morphology wearing a suit, and semantics is just pragmatics playing dress-up.”
Silence.
The Rebellion
That was when Professor Elspeth Harrington, aged 78, four-time honorary doctorate recipient, and survivor of the Great Prague School Schism, stood up.
Without a word, she lifted her copy of Functional Syntax: A Theory of Structure and Process—hardcover, revised edition—and hurled it across the room.
It struck the presenter square in the forehead.
He collapsed. The PowerPoint flickered. The laser pointer rolled from his hand.
The audience turned to the moderator, who, without missing a beat, cleared his throat and said:
“Let’s take a ten-minute break.”
Epilogue
No one spoke of the incident. The conference continued as if nothing had happened. But later that evening, in the dimly lit hotel bar, hushed voices whispered of the rogue scholar.
Some said he had survived. That he was out there still, lurking, waiting for his next opportunity.
Waiting for another conference.
Waiting… to be keynote.
The aftermath of the rogue keynote speaker's intellectual rampage left the conference in stunned silence. Papers had been clutched. Monocles had been dropped. A computational linguist had passed out from sheer statistical irrelevance. But just as the audience was beginning to regroup, hope flickered in the form of Professor Wilfred Montague, a seasoned corpus linguist with a lifetime subscription to Sketch Engine and the moral conviction of a man who had tagged a billion words and lived to tell the tale.
He stood up slowly, adjusting his glasses with the air of a man who had seen too much data to be ignored. “Excuse me,” he said, clearing his throat. “But surely, we must acknowledge the empirical reality of language? I mean, if we turn to the corpus—”
Click.
A new slide appeared on the screen, reading in bold Helvetica:
“Excel Spreadsheets Are Not Theories”
Gasps rippled through the corpus linguistics section of the audience.
Wilfred’s knuckles tightened around his lanyard. “But—but we have data!”
The rogue presenter, still rubbing the growing bruise from the Functional Syntax book that had nearly concussed him, sneered. “You mean descriptions of what has already happened? How illuminating. Shall we now predict the future of English by watching pigeons on a chessboard?”
Laughter. Scandalised muttering. A postgraduate student clutched his BNC dataset protectively, as if shielding it from heresy.
Wilfred’s face turned red. “Frequency matters,” he shot back.
The rogue presenter smirked. Click.
“Frequency is Not Explanation: A Cautionary Tale in Counting Things”
A bar chart appeared, showing an alarming correlation between increased avocado consumption and declining Chomskyan relevance.
The corpus section of the audience reeled. Someone whispered, "My God, he's weaponised sarcasm."
Montague’s voice wavered. “But—patterns—”
Click.
“Finding a Pattern in a Corpus and Calling it a Theory is Like Finding a Face in a Potato and Calling it a Religion.”
A stunned silence. Wilfred Montague sat down. Somewhere in the back, a corpus linguist wept softly into his collocation tables.
Just as the dust was settling, another figure rose. A bright-eyed computational linguist, nervously clutching a USB stick. “Well, actually,” they began, voice trembling, “we’ve been training a state-of-the-art transformer model on all available linguistic data, and I think it could resolve—”
Click.
"Neural Networks: When in Doubt, Predict 'The'"
The model's output appeared beneath it:
A strangled cry echoed from the machine-learning enthusiasts in the room. A man with an OpenAI tote bag collapsed into his chair. The rogue presenter merely gestured at the screen, then stepped back, arms crossed.
For the first time in conference history, no one had a rebuttal.
Fade to black.
