Journal of Language and Literature Volume 2 Number 1 2003 ISSN 1478 - 9116

1. Introduction

In the spring of 2002, I read Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels for the first time as an adult. Soon after, while following a brief electronic discussion on the CORPORA mailing list about the historical background of corpus linguistics, I realized that Swift could arguably be proposed as an illustrious forerunner of this new way of studying language. The main justification for my proposal is that Swift's writings abound in allusions to a dimension of language which makes the corpus linguistics enterprise possible. Swift, centuries before the advent of the mainframe and personal computer, shows in his only novel, and indeed throughout his work, an awareness of the physical dimension of language and an appreciation of language as phonic or graphic substance. In this paper I would therefore like to nominate Jonathan Swift as a major precursor of corpus linguistics. Indeed, had he not been such a devoted anti-papist, I might suggest he be canonized as patron saint of all those students of language who compile corpora to further their study.

2. Background

By the spring of 2002, the field of corpus linguistics, after some years of struggle to establish itself as a legitimate way of doing linguistics followed by a period of demarcation and self-vindication, had attained a degree of self-confidence within the language sciences. Some corpus linguists (Francis, 1992) had earlier begun to take stock and to examine the historical background of this sub-discipline.

A discussion began on its longest-standing and most prestigious mailing list, CORPORA, held at Bergen University in Norway, and various proposals were made for key texts, seminal works and landmarks in the intellectual pre-history of this suddenly fashionable school of linguistics. Rightly enough, key texts from the 1970s (McH Sinclair, 1970) were proposed as being seminal or formative. Pre-computer-age marvels of calculation and generalization were cited, most notably Markov (1912) and Zipf (1936), who, with their laborious 'manual' computations, paved the way for present-day researchers in Language Engineering who still extract Zipf distributions and Markov models from corpora. Herculean feats of manual concordancing were mentioned - for example, Cruden's Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testaments (1796).

I promptly posted a proposal of Jonathan Swift as precursor of corpus linguistics and then the thread came to an end. This may have been due to the divagation inherent in my mailing or because I arrived when attention was already shifting to other issues: that particular conversation had run its course. Indeed many practitioners of corpus linguistics perhaps thought it was time to return to more pressing workaday matters and leave the history for another time. In the rest of this paper, I would like to develop the idea I posted to the CORPORA debate. (The reader can read through the eleven contributions to the discussion by clicking next thread repeatedly. URL: http://www.hit.uib.no/corpora/2002-2/0041.html).

3. Textual Bases for my Claim

The realization that Swift had been aware of aspects of language which linguists have only come to grapple with recently first came to me when reading Gulliver's Travels (1726) (henceforth Gulliver), especially Part III, Ch 5, where the author describes a machine which generates books of "philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics and theology without the least assistance from genius or study". Gulliver gullibly observes that "everyone knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences". The professor of the Academy of Lagado who invented this engine (worked by 40 pupils who cranked handles and transcribed the output) told Gulliver that he had

emptied the whole vocabulary into the frame and made the strictest computation of the general proportion there is in books between the number of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech.

Chalker, in his endnotes to the 1967 Penguin Classic Edition of Gulliver, suggests that this Professor might be based on John Peters, who published a pamphlet, Artificial Versifying: A New Way to Make Latin Verses (1678), which was lampooned by Steele in The Spectator No 220:

This virtuoso, being a mathematician, has according to his taste, thrown the art of poetry into a short problem, and contrived tables by which anyone without knowing a word of grammar or sense may, to his great comfort, be able to compose, or rather to erect, Latin verses.

Swift may also have been thinking of the work on artificial languages done by George Dalgarno (1661) in Ars Signorum and Bishop John Wilkins (1668) in his An Essay Toward a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. If he was poking fun at Dalgarno's and Wilkins's ill-fated schemes to generate knowledge by inventing a new universal language of science, Swift showed himself to be aware of the mechanics of such knowledge-generation through the patterns of language. As in much of Swift's satire, it is often difficult to situate where Swift himself stands on the issue he is subjecting to irony, parody and other literary devices. The insouciance of Gulliver when faced with the marvellous scientific riches of Lagado might lead the unsuspecting reader to think that Swift, as author, was against the new science. His subtle deployment of the dual standpoints of author and narrator creates a hall of mirrors to puzzle readers.

There are a number of examples in Swift's other works where he seems almost to savour the bodily or physical aspect of words and language. For example, in the introduction to Section One of Tale of a Tub (1704), he characterizes words as

Bodies of much weight and gravity, as is manifest from those deep impressions they make and leave upon us; and therefore must be delivered from a due altitude, or else they will neither carry a good aim, nor fall with sufficient force.

Swift, in the same section, then dwells on books as substantial entities or indeed as living beings to be marshalled in a battle between three institutions, Grub Street (representing the journalists), Gresham (the Royal Society) and Will's Café (the poets):

I am informed, our two rivals have lately made an offer of to enter into the lists with united forces, and challenge us to a comparison of books, both as to weight and number … Where can they find scales of capacity enough for the first; or an arithmetician of capacity enough for the second?

Allowing the word and the book to become flesh comes through often in his work:

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seemeth to me to be alive and talking to me ("Thoughts on various subjects").

Hammond (1999) observes how Swiftian irony works by "materializing the abstract or by literalizing the figurative" often through the use of pun.

In the first page of his brief A Critical essay upon the faculties of the human mind (1708), where Swift apes a serious essay, we find a reductio ad adsurdum of Epicurus's cosmogony:

How can the Epicurean's opinion be true, that the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms: which I will no more believe, than that the accidental jumbling of the letters of the alphabet, could fall by chance into a most ingenious and learned treatise of philosophy.

It is the rhetorical aside about the stochastic generation of text which is interesting here in the way it presages the professors in the School of Languages at the Academy of Lagado. Swift is laughing at such an idea, but as in Gulliver and all his best writing, he allows the reader the pleasure (sometimes the horror) of imagining "yes, but what if … ?". He is perhaps the greatest virtuoso of thought experiments, the kind beloved of philosophers.

4. Rationale for this Conversation Between the Centuries, or a Voyage to Glubbdubdrib

Swift himself would no doubt have smiled at his name being cited in a discussion of the pre-history of a new approach to a human science and my contribution to the debate. Bringing a writer from the eighteenth century face-to-face with a new way of doing linguistics in the twentieth and twenty-first century might seem odd, but some examples from recent intellectual history might help show that Swift's ideas continue to have an impact on moral, political and philosophical issues long after his death.

It seems somehow appropriate that his satire on the political wranglings of his own day, the war between the Lilliputians and the Blefuscans should be immortalized in the world of computer architecture. Swift's distinctions and terms in Book I of Gulliver came to be used in informatics to characterize the distinct approaches of little-endians and big-endians. Danny Cohen (1980), in his pivotal paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace", uses the Lilliput-Blefuscu controversy as a template to analyse, and seek a solution for, a major ideological confrontation within software engineering.

Another justification for my introduction of Swift into the intellectual genealogy of corpus linguistics can be found in present-day Swiftian scholarship. In his work God, Gulliver and Genocide, Rawson (2001) attempts to show the relevance of ideas expressed in Book IV of Gulliver to the great moral quandary of recent history, genocide and, most notably, the Holocaust. Swift's Houyhnhnms' apologia for wiping the Yahoos off the face of the earth prefigured uncannily the Nazi rationale for their 'final solution'. Rawson affirms that Swift betrays

a harsh proleptic awareness of the later scenarios of oppression with their complacencies and self-deception as well as outright lying … A volatile combination of 'meaning it, not meaning it, and not not meaning it' enters into play, which varies with every example, may not ever be fully definable, and flirts elusively with its own literal content. (Rawson, 2001: 12)

This analysis uncovers for us some of the layers of complexity lying in this innocuous tale of rational horses and lascivious Yahoos and the jury of critics is still out on whether Swift favoured one more than the other, or repudiated both. On such a multilayered reading, it is easier to sympathise with T.S. Eliot's (1923) affirmation, in an essay on Joyce's Ulysses, that Swift's vision of the country of the Houyhnhnms was "one of the greatest triumphs that the human soul has ever achieved".

One final argument for bringing Swift into dialogue with modern linguistics derives from Swift himself and that haunting section of Book III of Gulliver where the hero, after his voyage to Glubbdubdrib, has the chance to dialogue with long-deceased thinkers such as Aristotle and Descartes. Perhaps we might emulate Gulliver and ask to commune for twenty-four hours with Swift himself.

5. Corpus Linguistics and What the Dean Might Supply

Corpus linguistics has been practised for longer than the short lifetime of the computer. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, an urgent task for American linguists was the creation of corpora of Amerindian languages threatened with extinction (Boas, 1911) and workers in the empiricist/behaviourist tradition insisted that a scientific theory of language should reject all data that are not directly observable or physically measurable (Bloomfield, 1935: 33). For these scholars, the corpus was the sine qua non of scientific description (Leech, 1991: 73).

The temporary fall from grace of behaviourist linguistics was the result of a paradigm shift within linguistics heralded by the publication of Chomsky's Syntactic Structures in 1957. One of the criticisms which Chomsky made of a corpus-based approach was that it modelled the wrong aspect of language - performance instead of competence. Spoken or written language as observed and captured in corpora is always imperfect due to tiredness, laziness, absentmindedness, carelessness and so on. The object of study of Chomsky's programme was the knowledge or competence underlying such performance data. What must the brain be like to account for the learning and production of language? This critique of empirical data is intimately linked to the theory which undergirds the whole Chomskian programme: namely, his modern version of Cartesianism. Chomsky, having stressed the creativity of language production in his overthrow of behaviourism, averred that no corpus could be a representative sample of the innumerable sentences of a language: the corpus would always be skewed. Even in the 1960s, a rearguard of linguists worked unashamedly with computer corpus collections of attested naturally-occurring language data, i.e., performance data (Kucera & Francis, 1967). This was flagrant empiricism against the prevalent rationalist tide and so we are right back in the Glubbdubdribrian world of Locke, Berkeley, and Hobbes pitted against Descartes and Spinoza, all of whose major works sat in Swift's study (Lefanu, 1988).

The mainframe and personal computer can be viewed as observation instruments which might revolutionize the science of linguistics as the telescope and the microscope revolutionized astronomy and medicine (Stubbs, 1996: 231). Swift's fascination with astronomical speculations is well-documented (Nicholson and Mohler, 1968) and is playfully depicted in the Laputans' fear of comets (Gulliver Book 3). In the Laputans, he did after all predict, although perhaps fortuitously, the second moon of Mars more than 150 years before its discovery in 1877.

Two leading corpus linguists, Sinclair and Renouf (1988), point out the relentless efficiency of the computer when used to observe language:

retrieval systems, unlike human beings, miss nothing if properly instructed - no usage can be overlooked because it is too ordinary or too familiar ... The human mind, contrary to popular belief, is not well organized for isolating consciously what is central and typical in the language; anything unusual is sharply perceived, but the humdrum everyday events are appreciated subliminally. (Sinclair & Renouf, 1988: 151)

In the final section of this paper, I would like to give the reader a glimpse of what the computer can tell us about Swift's language as revealed in the work of Milic (1967).

We have inherited a set of dualisms from our forebears - for instance, mind/body, langue/parole and competence/performance. A novel attempt to sit on the fence over one of these dichotomies is provided by Partington (1998: 145) when he suggests that a corpus is neither performance nor competence but supplants the differentiation between the two concepts. The concept of competence, the ideal speaker's knowledge of the language, raises certain philosophical problems because claims about 'ideal knowledge' are not falsifiable by any evidence. The individuality of performance needs to be transcended:

information about particular communicative events by itself is of limited, we might even say purely anecdotal value. By and large, we are not methodologically justified in interpreting the significance of a particular linguistic event unless we can compare it with other similar events. The corpus can provide "background information" against which particular events can be seen. (Partington, 1998: 146)

Swift showed awareness of this force towards dichotomization when he described the language professors at the Academy of Lagado (Gulliver Book III) who sought to abolish words and replace them with things. This passage and others (for instance, the Houyhnhnms' having no need to write) have led some critics to impute grammaphobia or a deep distrust of the written word to Swift (Castle, 1999: 239). Edward Said paints a more complex picture when he suggests rather that

Swift seems to have been very sensitive to the differences between writing and speaking … Each activity can take two forms, which we may call correct on the one hand and debased on the other (Said, 1999: 32).

6. Satire and Thought Experiments

The power and vehemence of Swift's irony is world-renowned. In the voyage to Laputa in Book III of Gulliver, he excoriates the more extravagant antics of the scientists of his day as reported in the Transactions of the Royal Society. Most of the incredible schemes ridiculed in the Grand Academy of Lagado visited by Gulliver in his voyage to Laputa have been traced to real experiments carried out by members of the Royal Society, whose premises, at Gresham College, Swift himself had visited in 1710. One of the features of Swift's deployment of irony to achieve his satire, which certain critics have remarked (e.g., Leavis, 1952), is that while his target suffers so also does the positive side he wishes to defend. In perhaps his most celebrated satire, A Modest Proposal, the English are depicted as cannibalising the Irish, but the Irish peasantry are not spared and come across as cannibals themselves and somehow complicitous in their own indigence. As Leavis (1952: 73-87) expresses it:

The continuous and unpredictable movement of the attack, which turns this way and that … inexhaustibly surprising-making again an odd contrast with the sustained and level gravity of the tone. If Swift does for a moment appear to settle down to a formula it is only in order to betray; to induce a trust in the solid ground before opening the pitfall.

Another feature of such a balancing act is that to be effective the ironic praise he heaps on his quarry must be convincing. Swift was able to 'get inside' his adversary. In the passage about the machine to generate philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics and theology, discussed in Section 3 above, Swift shows that he had thought through the construction of word frequency counts and the analysis of language according to the proportion of nouns, verbs and other parts of speech. It is only in recent years that linguists have been able to discuss the relative frequency of parts of speech with much degree of certainty and the recent literature of corpus linguistics (e.g., Biber, 1999) discusses the proportion of verbs to nouns in different registers, viz. conversation, news reportage, academic writing and fiction.

Even Swift's closest friends (Pope, Steele and Arbuthnot, the latter himself a scientist) were surprised by the viciousness of his attack on the scientists of his day. Perhaps as in all his celebrated satires the author's position lies somewhere in the middle (or nowhere?) and he merely covers his tracks by his scatter-gun use of irony, well described by Leavis above. In modern parlance, might Swift be described as the first linguistic terrorist?

Regardless of how this last question is answered, there is little doubt that Swift deliberately hid himself in many of his famous satires so that, for instance, we are still not sure if he thought all men or only the Irish were Yahoos, or whether he thought we should strive to become Houyhnhnms (rational animals), or whether he saw both Yahoo and Houyhnhnm as undesirable and lamentable states of being. This technique, by a stretch of the imagination, could be compared to the philosophical dialogues beloved of his friend George Berkeley, or of Plato. The use to which Danny Cohen (1980), as discussed above, put the Lilliputian and Blefuscan satire from Book I of Gulliver shows the power which such thought experiments can generate. The difference between Swift's satires and Berkeley's and Plato's dialogues is that they enable Swift to efface himself completely from the debate.

7. Swift's One Published and Signed Work on Language

Contradiction is not far away in the work of Swift. When we come to examine the work which most openly presents Swift's view of language, Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), we find him advocating the appointment of a society, along the lines of the French Academy, charged with discovering "some method …for ascertaining and fixing our language for ever". Swift thought highly of his proposal and it is one of the very few works that he signed. He laments the degeneration of the English language from the period when it "received most improvement", i.e., the Elizabethan-Jacobean era:

The persons who are to undertake this work … Beside the grammar part wherein we are allowed to be very defective they will observe many gross improprieties, which, however authorized by practice, and grown familiar, ought to be discarded. They will find many words that deserve to be utterly thrown out of our language, many more to be corrected, and perhaps not a few long since antiquated which ought to be restored on account of their energy and sound. (Swift, 1712: 14-15)

Once again we see Swift dwelling on words as physical entities or at any rate, as events, but his naïveté about language change is surprising and might seem to undermine my attempt to have him promoted to the position of Dean of corpus linguistics. He is propounding a reductionist theory of language. He appears to think it possible to freeze language and prevent it changing or evolving. When we see Swift lamenting the degradation of the English language since the time when it had flourished most (Elizabethan times), and when he talks of the barbarisms and affectations, he is looking at the wordstock, the language as a whole. There is a sense in which he sees words and language in all their physicality and substantiality. He uses core words in an almost physical way. When he says that poetry insinuates, he feels the power and weight of words:

True poets can depress and raise
Are lords of infamy and praise,
They are not scurrilous in satire,
Nor will in panegyric flatter.
Unjustly poets we asperse;
Truth shines the brighter clad in verse,
And all the fictions they pursue
Do but insinuate what is true. (Swift, Poetical Works)

Poetry differs from prose because the latter must carry an argument to convince. By insinuating, poetry evades the possibility of rejection.

Johnson's rejoinder to Swift's wild Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue is typically harsh and grudging to his forebear but would still find much sympathy today:

When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided … [who] shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay. (Quoted in Crystal (Ed.) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language: 73)

Simplistic as Swift's call for an English Academy might seem, this Proposal has other facets: it is Swift's aesthetic/artistic manifesto. He was not just being a "Tory anarchist", as Orwell (1968) suggests. He was, as Wordsworth would do later in the Prelude, limiting his lexicon and phrasicon to the core vocabulary of the language. Swift's Dublin publisher, Faulkner, recounts, in the preface of the first edition of his Works (1735), how Swift asked him to read aloud, in the presence of two men-servants, his proofs "which, if they did not comprehend, he would alter and amend, until they understood it perfectly well". We can understand from this that Swift had a firm grasp of the concept of core vocabulary as posited by Carter (1986) and was fully aware that non-possession of Graeco-Roman lexis might exclude those unfortunate enough not to have had a classical education (Corson, 1985) from understanding written texts. I surmise that he might even have viewed Ogden's Basic English (1930) as a blueprint for the implementation of his Proposal. His intentions were aesthetic, political, and moral and, although he might have been placing difficult restrictions on himself, the resulting prose and poetry bears an unmistakable stamp. Indeed, Sykes Davies underlines the importance of core vocabulary in achieving irony:

Flatness of language, commonplaceness, can itself serve as a key of de-coding of ironic messages, especially when it is brought into vivid contrast with the opposing qualities of violence and outrageousness of expression. (Sykes Davies, 1968: 144)

Milic (1967) maintains that Swift the writer and Swift the rhetorician were two different persons. His recommendations about usage were never fully implemented in his own work.

8. The Dean and Corpora

Said (1999), as discussed above, mentioned Swift's two models of conversation, correct as described in Hints towards an Essay on conversation (1710-1712) and debased as in A Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation according to the most polite mode and method now used at Court and in the best companies of England (henceforth, Polite Conversation (1738)). The first of these two works would seem to pave the way for a great deal of twentieth-century work on speech act theory, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

I consulted both works when I began to research prefabricated language (prefabs) in the teaching of English for Specific Purposes for my Ph.D, hoping to find intellectual precedents for my work. The layers of irony became more apparent to me as I saw that the latter work could be a primer for, or a wry comment on, the Lexical Approach to language teaching (Lewis, 1993).

Swift had already drawn attention, through the professor of Lagado Academy, to the importance of prefabs in building or reconstituting text. He takes up prefabs again in Polite Conversation, this playful work which was the result of a lifetime of cataloguing examples of linguistic abuse. As such, it can therefore be viewed as a continuation of the project outlined in Proposal to correct the English Tongue. He was collecting clichés in order to extirpate them. He describes how he built up a collection of fashionable sayings over 12 years of field work:

I determined to spend 5 mornings, to dine 4 times, pass three afternoons, and six evenings every week in the houses of the most polite families ... I always kept a large table-book in my pocket; and as soon as I left the company I immediately entered the choicest expressions.

He then spent a further 16 years "digesting it into a method".

Having worked as a corpus linguist, I found Swift's jovial account of how he accumulated his data startlingly like the way a corpus is built, discounting his hyperbole in the number of years he allocated to the research. He talks of the need for a further sixteen years' investigation. Finally he sat on his work for a further six or seven years, observing:

I have not been able to add above nine valuable sentences to enrich my collection; from whence I conclude that what remains will amount only to a trifle.

Nowadays, Swift's collection of smart chat might contain in the blurb that it was based on the author's own corpus which was more than 30 years in the making. There is little doubt that Swift's observation that the more observations he made, the fewer new phrases he uncovered will strike a chord with modern lexicographers using computer corpora or indeed the World Wide Web as their corpus to uncover neologisms. The author of Polite Conversation, chortling behind one of his many heteronyms, Simon Wagstaff Esq., may have been imaginatively prefiguring work done more than 250 years after his death by applied linguists such as Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992), Lewis (1993), and Willis and Willis (1988, 1998), who recommend using chunks of language rather than words as the curricular basis of language teaching.

9. The Spider Gets Webbed

In the final section of my paper I would like to give a brief report on corpus linguistic findings applied to Swift's own work. It is only appropriate that this eminent precursor should have been one of the first authors to be subjected to a major computer corpus study, and Milic (1967: 15), in one of the earliest book-length computerised analyses of a single writer's style, claims to have been impressed by the Professor of Lagado (Gulliver Book III):

[the] language frame (so reminiscent of a computer programmed to 'generate' English sentences) struck me as the perception of a man to whom the mysterious relation between symbol and thing was intuitively clear.

Milic (1990) created a special reference corpus or historical corpus called "The Century of Prose Corpus" or the Augustan Corpus. Part A consists of samples from the work of twenty major prose writers of the period. Part B incorporates samples of prose compositions written between 1680 and 1780. This represents the journalists, scholars, men of letters, popular fiction writers, educationalists and others who produced the typical works against which the noteworthy authors of the period can be compared. Swift's use of sentence-initial connectives proved to be one of the most distinctive features of his prose. He uses them at least twice as frequently as any of his contemporaries. Below is an adaptation of Table 5.1 (Milic 1967: 125).

Percentage of initial connectives in 2,000-sentence samples of Addison, Johnson, Macaulay and Swift
CONNECTIVE	Addison	Johnson	Macauley	Swift
Coordinating conjunction (e.g., and, but, or)	5.5	5.8	7.4	20.2
Subordinating conjunction (e.g., after, when, if)	7.1	6.2	4.1	5.4
Sentence connectors (e.g., however, therefore, in the meantime, in short)	3.3	1.4	1.5	8.3
TOTAL	15.9	13.4	13.0	33.9

I include this table in order to give the reader a taste of the riches of Milic (1967) and hope I will not be accused of virtuoso sleight of hand or the spurious wiles of a projector.

In the Swift 2,000-word sample, 678 begin with a connective and 354 of these are with and, but or for (but is his favourite). Milic observes that Swift does not use and, but, or or in the customary way to impart the logical connection between sentences, but rather as a neutral connective, that is a word which shows a connection without specifying the nature of that connection. Milic points out that in English if a sentence does not begin with the subject (a noun or nominal) but begins with a connective, it is safe to assume that the next word will be a nominal or determiner. Not so in Swift. Almost a third of the times, Swift defers the subject to interject a further connective or transitional word (e.g., But although, And first, but then, but at present). According to Milic, two effects of this idiolectal use of connectives by Swift is to involve the reader more in the text and to create the illusion of greater clarity and simplicity (Milic, 1967: 136).

Sadly, space does not permit us to follow this analysis which takes us to the King James version of the Bible among other places. Milic discovers and attempts to explain many other interesting features of Swift's style (e.g., his lists), testing and often proving vacuous many of the claims made about Swift's style in the centuries since his death.

10. Conclusion

In this paper, I have looked at some of the ideas of Jonathan Swift and their possible implications for the historical background of corpus linguistics. Although Swift is always playful and elusive, I think he shows a genuine fascination with the physical and quantificational side of language. In my own work on phraseology, I continue to learn from his works, especially his Hints towards an Essay on conversation (1710-1712) and Polite Conversation (1738) - but above all from Gulliver, that compendious treatise on human nature. I suggest he be posthumously consecrated as the Bishop of Balnibarbi and Grammarian-in-chief of Glubbdubrib.

Or have I been taken in by one of the greatest hoaxers of all time?

About the Author

John McKenny is Senior Lecturer at the English Language Centre, Northumbria University. He is completing a Ph.D on the phraseology of academic prose at the School of English, Leeds University, and is a contributor to the Surnames of Ireland Project at the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages.

Email: j.mckenny@northumbria.ac.uk

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