free software. the american dream.

The Department of Linguistics was not familiar with Funding: they referred me to the NSF just a few thousand miles from Calhoun -- but when I got there, the money-woman refused to give me more than an honorable mention. They had no idea who I was, they said, and by that time I was pouring sweat. My topic is too thick for the Feds: I have never been able to properly explain myself in that climate. Not with the soaking sweats . . . wild ideas and trembling hands.

So I took the honorable mention and left. My classmates were waiting in a bar around the corner. "This won't make the nut," they said, "unless we have student loans."

I assured them we would. "You linguists are all the same," I told them. "You have no faith in the essential decency of the Scientific Community. Jesus, just one semester ago we were sitting over there in Jester Hall, stone broke and paralyzed by Minimalism, when a call for applications comes through from some total stranger in Edinburgh, telling me to do computational linguistics and here's a position -- and then he sends me over to some office in the Service Building where another total stranger gives me a few keys to the labs . . . I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We'd be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end."

"Indeed," they said. "We must do it."

"Right," I said. "But first we need the computers. And after that the corpora. And then the iPod, for special music, and some Guyabara shirts." The only way to prepare for a trip like this, I felt, was to dress up like computer scientists and get crazy, then screech off across campus and do the research. Never lose sight of the primary responsibility.

But what was the research? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Software. The American Dream. Hunter S. Thompson gone mad on linguistics in Austin. Do it now: pure Gonzo Linguistics.

There was also the sociolinguistic factor. Every now and then when your studies get complicated and the syntacticians start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on semantic theories and then derive like a bastard from Heim and Kratzer. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the Texas sun. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a poem of Eliot.

Paint me a cavernous waste shore
  Cast in the unstilled Cyclades,
Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks
  Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.