By Chip Byteley
The Linguistics Department of a prestigious university descended into chaos this week after a class of bewildered undergraduates filed a formal complaint. Their grievance? Their Scottish professor’s lectures were unintelligible, resembling “a long-lost language, possibly Ancient Coptic.”
“It’s not just the accent,” a visibly shaken student explained, clutching her lecture notes filled with indecipherable scrawls. “It sounds like English, but…not. Is he chanting? Is this an elaborate performance art piece?”
Professor Angus McTavish VI, a renowned scholar of Old Gaelic dialects, is perplexed by the accusations. “Ach, the wee bairns just dinnae ken the beauty o’ the Hielands tongue,” his booming voice reverberating through the halls, seemingly confirming the students’ anxieties.
The Linguistics Department is scrambling. Emergency workshops on “Scottish Brogue Decoding” are hastily arranged. Experts on Celtic languages are flown in, each more bushy-bearded than the last, to decipher the professor’s enigmatic mutterings.
Meanwhile, the internet explodes with theories and desperate pleas for subtitles:
- “Is this what English sounded like before the Great Vowel Shift?” ponders an amateur linguist.
- “He’s definitely summoning a rain demon,” declares a superstitious blogger.
- “My Scottish grandma is easier to understand and she speaks while knitting,” laments a confused undergrad.
Conspiracy theories abound. Some suspect the professor is a time traveler from a forgotten Scottish kingdom. Others allege he’s conducting a secret linguistic experiment, gradually replacing English with his ancestral tongue.
Professor McTavish remains unfazed, his kilt swirling with each emphatic gesture. “They’ll catch on eventually,” he proclaims confidently. “Or evolve thicker ears.”
The university, in a last-ditch attempt to maintain peace, considers the following solutions:
- Providing students with sheepskin parchments and quills, as it’s clearly more era-appropriate for note-taking.
- Adding “Understanding the Scottish” as a mandatory general education course.
- Hiring a bagpiper to drown out the professor’s lectures entirely.
As the semester progresses, a strange camaraderie forms. Students gather before class, practicing phrases like “Aye, yer bum’s oot the windae” with dubious pronunciation and exaggerated rolling Rs. Professor McTavish, sensing their struggle, begins incorporating dramatic gestures and visual aids. His discussion of ancient Celtic bards turns into a rousing, if slightly confusing, interpretive dance.
By the end of the term, something miraculous happens. Student evaluations turn from panicked to appreciative. “At first, I was lost,” one student admits, “now I think in limericks and crave haggis. It’s a full cultural immersion!”
Whether this incident marks a breakthrough in cross-cultural education or the dawn of a new, slightly more Scottish-infused English remains to be seen. One thing’s for sure: at this university, language learning just got a whole lot more adventurous.
Polly Tickle 
Dominick