catcher. I donât even know if thatâs a different band of Indians or what. I donât know a goddamned thing about Indians except that my brother and I both look darker and we used to sit on his porch and drink beer and we used to make each other laugh.
Yours,
Joey Comeau
Dear University of Victoria,
I am applying to the position for university linguistics professor with your university, because while my love is language, it is also worth noting that languageâs love is me, for real, and it isnât as strange as it sounds because I think you will agree that while the verb love requires an agent of a living nature, language fills that requirement nicely â living as it does in the hearts and souls of every man, woman, child, and seeing eye dog that wanders this earth with a song in masculine, feminine, or neuterâs possessive pronounâs heart and mind, and I feel that working in your university program, teaching undergrads and graduate students would not be the hell that your job description evokes, but instead an opportunity to teach a love of language to a world that has decided to hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate, and language is how we hold on to our family and how we figure out our place and how we order in a French restaurant to impress our date and hey, have you ever stopped to think that explicity is a much nicer word than explicitness on all fronts, at every border, in every way I feel this is true, and because I sat down to write them out, about a dozen times each, I feel I can speak with authority, using definiteness, definity, and seriously â itâs just nicer I think, spiritually, though Iâm still working on this study to try and prove it through polling of students at my current university, even though they just sort of stare at me all slack-jawed, drool making the mad dash for a pavement that couldnât help but offer more in the way of intellectual stimulation than the chasm that is the modern undergraduate mind, thatcouldnât help but challenge the drool in a way that no English composition course could hope to, not in a world where universities are too willing to hire professors who prescribe standard grammars as truer languages and to grant doctorates to such nincompoops with nonsense in their heads, no hearts in their chests, making me wonder about, well, donât think I havenât noticed that explicity has that little red underline in my word processor, my computerâs way of endorsing those effers and their effing prescriptions, their nasal voices preaching âno prepositions at the ends of sentences, unless you have to, no split infinitives, no run on whatever, no this, no that,â and I sincerely believe that theyâve cheated on their significant others, and I bet theyâve heard someone say something hateful toward the speech patterns of foreigners just learning English, and laughed, and I bet theyâve used the word âebonicsâ knowing full well the condescending, racist nature of the word itself, relishing that root, âebony,â smiling at their coworkers from the African studies department in the hall, all the while having to consciously refrain from asking, âWhat is it that be the up?â in perfect imitation of the phonetic transcripts theyâve been reading about in little journals, hate rags, and maybe theyâve picked up on the careful lexical selections in my anonymous letters, in the casual threats I leave on their answering machines, and no I canât promise that I wonât physically attack these people if you hire me, but I can promise you this: I will be the best linguistics professor youâve ever had, the professor that students recommend to one another, the new hotness, the rad, and in dark corners my colleagues over in the department of âStandard Englishis the one true lordâ will fear the truth I bring to their students, my anger, my