Alien Language Discovered to Have No Word for 'War' but 47 Words for 'Bureaucracy'

A comprehensive lexical analysis of the Kepler-442 language has revealed a civilization that appears to have never developed a concept for armed conflict but has, over the course of its history, coined 47 distinct words for bureaucracy. 'There is no word for war,' said Dr. Amira Hassan, the corpus linguist who led the analysis. 'There is no word for battle, siege, invasion, or conquest. There is no military vocabulary whatsoever. But there are 47 words for bureaucracy, each describing a different type of administrative process, level of institutional complexity, or degree of paperwork-induced despair.' The 47 bureaucracy words range from what translates roughly as 'the pleasant filing of a simple form' to 'the soul-crushing navigation of overlapping jurisdictions where no one is responsible and everyone requires a signature from someone else.' Word 47, the most extreme, translates to 'a process so complex that it has developed its own bureaucracy to manage the bureaucracy, which itself requires a permit.' 'It tells us something profound about their civilization,' said Dr. Hassan. 'They solved violence. They did not solve paperwork. In fact, it appears that the energy other civilizations devote to war, they devoted to administrative infrastructure. The result is a society that is perfectly peaceful and completely unable to issue a building permit in under six years.' Cultural anthropologists have noted parallels with human civilization. 'We have 50 words for snow in certain languages,' said Dr. Thomas Reeves. 'They have 47 words for bureaucracy. A species develops vocabulary for what dominates its environment. Their environment is apparently forms.' The Kepler-442 civilization's response to humanity's first contact message took eleven years to arrive, not because of signal travel time but because the reply required approval from what translates as 'the Subcommittee for External Communication within the Department of Non-Domestic Affairs under the Bureau of Entities That Are Not Us.' The approval, when it came, was stamped with 23 administrative seals and contained a request that humanity submit form XC-1 before sending additional messages.