Letters to the Editor SpecGram Vol CLIX, No 4 Contents An Introduction to Linguistics in Haiku Form—Anonymous

Meet the SpecGram Editors

In response to a decades-long demand to lift the veil of near-anonymity behind which the editors of Speculative Grammarian live, lurk, and work, we have begrudgingly agreed to provide publicly for the very first time a series of brief biographical sketches of select editors. Those editors with multiple outstanding federal warrants for their arrest on charges of unlawful creolization of conlangs, juxtapositional delinquency, and flagrant or willful violation of island constraints have been excluded, upon advice from our attorneys. Two more biographical sketches are below.


Name: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira
Title: Consulting Editor
Birthdate: July 28, 1872
Areas of Research: Teutonic Multilingualism, Romance Comparativism and Romance tout court.

Bio: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira was born too early to be allowed to secure any kind of position, vertical, horizontal or oblique, in academia, and too late to aim at obtaining kudos from her intellectual accomplishments through the practice of vestal druidism. She therefore made an early decision to become multilingual, simply to exert revenge upon extant academic theorisation of and about monolinguistic Language Faculty worldwide, and a late one to beg admittance to some highfalutin’ editorial post with Speculative Grammarian. Both succeeded.

In her youth, she babysat Franco Corelli’s mother in order to be able to fund her budding research into Bel-Canto and Bel-Parlo, only to find herself irrecoverably infatuated with her ward’s offspring later on. The offspring’s babbled arpeggios in B flat minor (when lying prone) and one-word pizzicato in F sharp major (when throwing tantrums about maternal food choices) triggered her fascination with infantile language. Franco’s compelling dramatic register and spellbinding slurred delivery also laid the foundations of her specialisation in intonative prosodemics, phonossomatics and phonosemantics, as well as of her interest in glotto-, grotto-, glosso-, and grosso-philologic maladies, and in Oxford com(m)atose disorders.

Turn-ons: Franco Corelli’s high, mid and low C’s; Franco Corelli’s other alphabetical achievements; Franco Corelli tout court; impersonating concupiscent mezzo roles, especially Carmen, Maddalena (no relation), Cherubino and Octavian, but also, somewhat incestuously, Azucena in early productions of young Franco’s Il Trovatore.

Turn-offs: Monolinguistic Language Faculties.

Publication Highlights, in English (there is no point in listing publications in other languages because nobody bothers reading them anyway):


Name: Trey Jones
Title: Managing Editor
Birthdate: September 28, 1889
Areas of Research: Historical NLP and Computational Philology
Turn-ons: long walks among dusty library shelves, erotic rekuhkara performances, and results with a high degree of statistical significance
Turn-offs: fervent lexicalism, fervent anti-lexicalism, and claimed biological inability to perform trills

Biographic Snapshot: Trey Jones was born a tenured Professor of Philology at Eötvös Loránd University, an inherited position passed down to him by his great-great-aunt Gertrude von Joones. He spent his early years in Texas, wrangling cattle, drilling wildcat oil wells, and doing fieldwork among Tonka trucks (having misidentified them as members of the Tonkawa tribe). In the early 1910s he discovered the writings of Charles Babbage and Rasmus Rask, and his life-long love affair with Computational Philology began. In the late 1960s, he finally took up the duties of his inherited academic position (which had been providing a hefty stipend over the years), but left after nine and a half weeks due to creative differences with the chair and several end tables in the Philology Department. He then began pursuing a position with Speculative Grammarian. Finally, in the early 1990s, he secured a position with the journal as assistant to the lead deputy janitor, in charge of cleaning the private “language laboratory” booths used by the editorial board. Through a series of subliminal suggestions and Machiavellian manœuvers—detailed discussion of which the settlement terms of several libel lawsuits prevent—he eventually became the Publisher and Managing Editor of SpecGram in 2004. Since that time, he has brought a sense of conservative dignity and classical scholarship to the journal. That, and Jello Wrestling Wednesdays.

Publication Highlights:

Letters to the Editor
An Introduction to Linguistics in Haiku FormAnonymous
SpecGram Vol CLIX, No 4 Contents