spake
Explanation
This comic imagines a linguist's version of the Tower of Babel myth from the Bible.
A man stands at a podium reciting scripture-like text: "And the Lord spake, saying 'Behold, now I have made grammars as multitudinous as the stars. Let all word orders shine forth in their varied lexicons, and let every phoneme dwell in some mouth!'" The caption reads: "Linguists have their own version of the Babel myth."
In the original Biblical story of Babel (Genesis 11), God punishes humanity's hubris by confusing their single language into many, scattering people across the earth. The comic reimagines this as a celebratory, positive act rather than a punishment -- the Lord joyfully creating linguistic diversity as something beautiful. This reflects how linguists tend to view the incredible variety of human languages not as a curse or inconvenience, but as a fascinating and wonderful phenomenon to be studied and preserved. The use of archaic language ("spake," "behold") and the reverent podium setting add to the parody of treating linguistic diversity as sacred scripture.