About a month ago, I wrote an open letter to the Hindustan Times in which I criticized their Sunday columnist Karan Thapar for often putting together his columns based on boring email forwards full of banalities. It was almost as if his grandson (assuming he has one) wrote those columns based on whatever the funniest joke in his kindergarten class was. I say this because I think it was around 1st standard that the ‘P.U.T. is pronounced _put_ but B.U.T is pronounced _but’_ joke ceased to be funny. Not content with this, he followed it up with not one but eighteen examples of homonyms, in an attempt to demonstrate that English spelling and pronunciation are ambiguous.
I mailed my letter to the Hindustan Times, not expecting it to be published. Surprisingly, they printed it next Sunday. I was in Japan that weekend, so I didn’t get to read it, and then forgot about it. It was only when an acquaintance mentioned reading it that I was reminded of it. Most of what I wrote had been condensed to make it sound more spiteful. Anyhow, what I found rather amusing was that, while they had shortened and edited my sentences, they replaced the word _linguists_ in my original letter to linguistic scientist, a phrase that is not only longer, but is also significantly rarer in use. In fact, a Google search for _linguistic_ _scientist_ returns only 37000 results, and almost all the results on the first few pages are irrelevant. In short, no one really uses the term linguistic scientist. I have no idea why they did that, but I presume it’s because they think linguistics is a flaky profession full of fluff, and perhaps putting ‘science’ somewhere there would help improve its credibility. Sigh.
So, I will use this platform to convey to the small handful of people who read Linguistrix—Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and linguists are people who engage in this study. The Wiki page on Linguistics has a fair summary of the field. You might want to check it out.