LAEL Department 40th Birthday Rap

Before one department all others pale
It's 40 years old, and its name is LAEL
In the old school days you had to walk from town
You got hit with a cane if you forgot your gown

Since then we've grown, now we have all flavors
So we don't understand each others' papers
We got CDA and we got pragmatics
And clever students who don't know mathematics
We got literacy and SLA
And a little bit of corpus somewhere far away

But we don't care about subfield labels
We know what matters and it's called league tables
We're gonna catch up, we're gonna grab the gold
Although linguistics at Cambridge is 900 years old

We love Vic, Vicky, Becky, Elaine and Marjorie
But the Phonetics Lab looks like a doctor's surgery
They have a torture cage with which they'll surround you
Then they'll mold your palate and they'll ultrasound you

Speaking of ultrasound, everybody's having babies
Rescuing kittens, and Winston's got rabies
Still there's only one thing that we really fear
But Alison comes only twice a year

Now if this rap isn't quite what you expected
Don't forget when I applied I was initially rejected
But I'm so glad that they changed their mind
Even though I left America far behind

Of course I miss my right to bear arms
But an English life has different charms
We got the Lake District, the Trough of Bowland
The Duchess of Cambridge, and Ronnie Rowlands

So the question is, or maybe I already know
Como dicen Los Clash, should I stay or should I go?

video of rap during break in song