The tortured mind of Jared Lee Loughner, currently charged with the killing of 6 people and the attempted murder of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, appears to have had a fixation on grammar. On the internet, he posted “The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar. You control your English grammar structure.” And in a political meeting he is reported to have said “What is government if words have no meaning?”, a plaintive cry that makes one wonder if he was familiar with the speeches of Thai politicians.

Some observers have noted a similarity with the ideas of David Wynn Miller, owner of an almost impenetrable website which includes the idea that if you add a colon or hyphen or two to your name, this turns you into a prepositional phrase. And he has done this, styling himself as “PLENIPOTENTIARY-JUDGE: David-Wynn: Miller”. The advantage of this is that prepositional phrases do not have taxable status.

The courts have repeatedly judged that this novel interpretation of the revenue code is entirely spurious and a number of hyphenated and colon-ized followers of PLENIPOTENTIARY-JUDGE: David-Wynn: Miller have been found guilty of not paying their taxes. It is not known if any court has also convicted them of gross ignorance of the form and function of prepositional phrases.

But this has not stopped a number of other odd-balls from seeking immunity from the law on similarly bizarre linguistic-existential grounds.

A Spanish tourist charged in Phuket provincial court with speeding argued that he was not in fact Francisco Suarez, as his passport and other documents indicated, but a Spanish irregular verb ‘biner’, meaning ‘to win at a game of chance’, with a 1st person present tense form ‘yo bingo’. Since the Thai traffic code is completely silent on speed restrictions for irregular verbs, he argued that he could drive (or, as he put it to the court, ‘conjugate’) at any speed he liked.

The judge, in returning a guilty verdict, disagreed and further found that irregular verbs were not competent to hold driving licences and so hit him with a second fine. He was warned as to his future behaviour and advised to behave ‘in a more regular way’.

A second-hand mobile phone dealer who was escorted to Makkasan police station in the early hours by two bouncers from the Seventh Heaven massage parlour on New Petchburi rejected claims that he had not paid for the ‘special smoking’ services of a sex worker. He was, he claimed, not a normal punter, but in fact an internet domain.

Signing the police blotter as ‘www.freesex.co.th/boomboom’, he claimed that as an internet entity he was capable of engaging only in virtual sex and should not be expected to pay, which would in any case be a violation of his website’s policy.

The officers on duty were at first perplexed as to how to proceed with the case, since the Criminal Code says nothing about internet domains and the Computer Crimes Act was designed for the completely different purpose of suppressing political dissent. Eventually it was agreed that the bouncers should take him round the back and beat the virtual crap out of him while all formal charges would be dropped.

In a more high profile case, a member of the Thai Patriots Network has argued that the detention and trial of their members by the Cambodian government for alleged illegal entry were completely without foundation on two grounds.

First, the place where the arrests were made is known by all true Thai patriots not to be Cambodia. The fact that the Thai government does not claim it as being part of Thailand means that it is not in fact national territory but a mythical realm where illegal entry is a logical impossibility.

Second, it is totally improper for Cambodian courts to treat Thai patriots as if they were ordinary persons subject to man-made law. Thai patriots have a special genetic make-up which endows them with a superior wisdom to recognize threats to national security far better than the government or military. They also have an instinctive knowledge of what is true and righteous together with the natural right to decide what is best for the rest of the country.

Asked if this meant that they were god-like super-humans, the spokesperson demurred. Thai patriots are superior to that.