Knock knock.

Come in, said my supervisor, sit down. What can I do for you?

I'm having a small linguistic crisis, I say. I seem to be slowly losing all capacity for everyday speech.

I nearly told my mother yesterday that I needed to engage her in a resolutely heterogeneous discourse on the subject of Christmas. Worst of all, I can't shake the fear that I'm not even speaking Academia correctly, like I'm performing King Lear in faltering Russian and everyone's nodding and clapping in the right place but any minute now I'll put a vowel in the wrong place and accidentally call somebody's sister a cunt and I'll be chased off the stage and shamed into quitting my PhD and becoming an assistant manager at Thomas Cook in Croydon for the next thirteen years instead.

Also, I keep having to write the phrase 'epistemological underpinnings'. And it's making me think constantly of huge, nylon 1960s pants. Those great swathes of tight, man-made fibre in beige designed to pull in everywhere preventing unsightly breathing and giving one the kind of posture that made Britain great. "Do pull over Norman dear, the clasp on one of my epistemological underpinnings has come loose again and the whole thing is riding up my..."

Yes, yes, said my supervisor. But is there actually anything I can help you with?

No, that was all. Same time next month?

Right.

Right.