Shakespeare, Greeks and Dogs, Oh My!—A Letter from Contributing Editor Jonathan Downie SpecGram Vol CLXXXV, No 3 Contents /nuz baɪts/

Letters to the Editor

Dear Most Honored Sirs and Ma’ams,

I was quite pleased with the positional symbolism of the letters in your latest issue. The placement of the bubbly lightness of the wugs bubbling lightly to the top combines deliciously with the four-square squareness of the discussion of matrices belying the crookedness of the subtext, and its placement cattycorner from other crookedness emphasizes the crookedness that underlies all human endeavor; while the placement of the discussion of trees, with the Canadian on the left and the Texan on the right, as so often holds, is fittingly at the bottom, symbolizing the foundational importance of trees to both linguistics and the ecosystem, and even to the paper industry that your journal has left behind. I have written four papers on the different textual and subtextual aspects of the latest letters and submitted them to a variety of journals. If any are rejected, I might send them your way, for there is nothing so deliciously meta as publishing an analysis of a journal in that journal...however, as I do not yet have tenure, my professional leeway for perpetrating true meta is rather limited and you don’t really look good on a CV, even when placed there ironically, so it might be a while to run through all the other possible venues.

Sincerely,
Melinda Melissa Mallett
Lecturer, Department of Applied Abstract Feng Shui Studies,
Mooniversity of Moonupeedika, Kerala

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Dear Mel-Mel,

Actually, we stuck ’em in where they’d fit, with the lousier stuff below the fold. And if any of your papers are rejected, then please do send them our way, for in fact there is nothing so deliciously meta as publishing rejected articles about rejecta in a journal for rejects, except for a journal for rejects rejecting a rejected article about that journal...but as our leeway for rejecting space-filler is quite limited, we’ll probably print it.

Meta-ironically yours,
—Eds.

Dear Cheap Eds,

First up, as this pertains to your May 2017 issue (CLXXIX.1), allow me to communicate my astonishment that you retain these passé issues of your organ on the website for that length of time.

Anyway, to the issue (i.e. mine, of your issue). In the otherwise unremarkable ‘editorial’ for this issue (yours, not mine), I did happen to remark on the phrase ‘ascended to the hoi oligoi’. Now, leaving aside the grotesquery of not employing Greek orthography for Greek phrases, let me focus on the blatant repetition of the definite article which this mis-phrasing employs: hoi (οἱ) is of course the masculine nominative, plural form of the article. You should have written, using the dative and a sole article, ‘ascended τοῖς ὀ​λιγοῖς’.

I’ll leave it σοι to sort out this mess.

Psynopteres O’Duffle
Editor: The Irish-Hellenic Bulletin of Athenian Panhandlers
President of the Society for Accurate Greek (P-SAG)

P.S.: Please use Greek numerals for your issues not these clunky Roman ones.

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Dear Ps,

P.S. is Latin.

—Eds.

P.S. The rest of your letter is PS in our view.

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Dear Eds,

Why?

N. Quiringly

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Dear Quirky,

Why not?

—Eds.


Speculative Grammarian accepts well-written letters commenting on specific articles that appear in this journal or discussing the field of linguistics in general. We also accept poorly-written letters that ramble pointlessly. We reserve the right to ridicule the poorly-written ones and publish the well-written ones... or vice versa, at our discretion.

Shakespeare, Greeks and Dogs, Oh My!A Letter from Contributing Editor Jonathan Downie
/nuz baɪts/
SpecGram Vol CLXXXV, No 3 Contents