In a surprise turn of events, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva has generated a new part of speech that does not fit into the Standard Model of Grammar. After smashing participles and articles into each other, experimental linguists found not only particles, as expected, but also words of a hitherto unknown category, provisionally labelled as articiples.

A collision between the article the and the participle gone produced the particle to (which in nature only ever exists in infinitives such as to be) accompanied by the novel word ghene. Now that the experimenters know what to look for, they expect to find other articiples. Until then, it’s hard to ascertain the meaning, function or even pronunciation of ghene.

The discovery has already led to frenzied speculation among theoretical linguists. ‘I believe that smashing articles into any part of speech may yield an “art of speech”, given the right conditions’, said Oene Daasma, a theoretical linguist at the University of Franeker, the Netherlands. ‘And in the privacy of our coffee corner, I’ve heard my Harderwijk colleague Fetze Alsvanouds think out loud that verbs might be turned into adverbs by adding no matter what, preferably nothing or even less. These are exciting times for theoretical linguistics.’