Cull Those Writers! The Lines Are Open!—SpecGram Management Executive Group (SMEG) SpecGram Vol CLXXXIX, No 4 Contents

Onomastic Destiny ♂

Dirk Delarme & Emma Gassert

Despite the breathless coverage of nominative determinism in the popular press (and other outlets that should know better), there still seems to be something about people’s names that can subtly influence their choice of career.

The ten men listed below are all linguists of one stripe or another. Can you determine their areas of specialization, based on the subtly mystical impact their names have had on their professional lives?

Submit your answers to the editors of SpecGram by March 15, 2021, and you could win a prize. Solutions and winners will be announced in the next issue of SpecGram.


The solutions to last month’s puzzle, Mix & Match ††, are provided here. The nine 9-letter words from the first puzzle are: designate, inhumanly, ideograph, zoomorphy, apparatus, phenotype, postfixes, archivist, manifesto; and the three additional words are: endophora, narrative, anaptyxis. For the second puzzle, the nine words are: implosive, hoarsened, indicator, continuum, alkaloids, completed, egomaniac, duratives, tenseness; and the three additional words are: monologue, oscillate, intuitive. Each of the puzzlemeisters below will receive some moderately desirable SpecGram merch:

Cindy AlmondEric ChenThorsten SchröterVincent FishKeith Slater

Cull Those Writers! The Lines Are Open!SpecGram Management Executive Group (SMEG)
SpecGram Vol CLXXXIX, No 4 Contents