Ralph and I went to the student center to study for midterms. He was reading an econ textbook and I was studying psycholinguistics. Every time I looked up, I caught the eye of Ham from Constructed Worlds, who was sitting at a nearby table with three other guys.

After a few minutes, Ham came to our table.

“You seem pretty interested by that book,” he said. “What’s it about?”

I tipped it up to show the cover, which was purple and said LANGUAGE in big white letters.

“Man, do I hate language,” Ham said. “If I had it my way, we would all just grunt.”

“If we all did that, the grunting would become a language.”

“Not the way I would do it.”

“Really,” I said.

In reply he made some kind of noise.