The Literature and Linguistics Analysis Benchmark (LALA) assesses how closely LLMs approach human-like linguistic competence through open-ended questions written by professors and experts at top universities. Our most important finding is that linguistic competence is not cumulative and additive; sometimes more post-training makes a model less intelligent, suggesting general intelligence is impossible to achieve from an LLM, let alone superintelligence. The benchmark has two major findings and several significant methodological contributions to the emerging field of LLM benchmarking.