Sunday, May 08, 2016

School tests create surge in new medical conditions

In recent weeks teachers have noticed a number of new illnesses among their students. Little is known about many of these diseases, but there is a strong suspicion they are linked to government testing. Here is the latest list of new disorders:

Adverbal diarrhoea

Burst apostrophe

Checking pox - spontanous outburst of pimples occurring when a student notices with 1 minute to go that they've misread the question

Compound fracture - inability to hold 2 parts of a word together. Most common in teenagers.

Conjunctiontivitis

Consonantipation - usually due to a blockage in the vowels

Tense future - usually afflicts children the week before SATS tests

Homophonia - fear of words which sound the same. There is a related strain occurring in foreign languages, which is an irrational fear of two nouns of the same gender occurring too close to each other in a sentence.

Severe inflection: this could take the form of Phonemonia, or Pluralisy, which usually affects several parts of the body at once

Passive tense - the student is so stressed they are unable to get out of bed

Past tense - Ofsted was last week

Possessive Compulsive Disorder - someone who finds it difficult to share a pencil during an exam.

Prolapsed pronoun

Punctuated ulcer - in extreme cases, the patient ends up in a comma.

Many of these seem to be mutations of previously harmless bits of grammar. Kept in isolation, or small groups, grammar is benign, but large swarms of grammatical terms seem to exhibit different behaviour, and have a toxic effect on those using them. The misplaced apostrophe has always been capable, on it's own, of exciting high levels of stress and rage, but this is the first time we have seen such dramatic effects in other sections of the English language.

2 comments:

  1. I take it that 'on it's own', with a redundant apostrophe, was deliberate?

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    1. Redundant apostrophe's, that's a whole different world of pain. Everyone else gets an apprenticeship, but the streets are littered with apostrophes discarded by children after they leave school. Sitting alone and unused on the smartphone keypad, queueing at the punctuation foodbank, oh you've just upset me now.....

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