maybe you should derive

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a linguist." -- paraphrase of Dr. John(s)son

We were somewhere around Barss and Lasnik on the edge of syntax when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should derive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the board was full of what looked like huge trees, all merging and joining and diving around the theory, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Linguistics. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn Agrs?"