Madam,

I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to our sister in arms Lea Kim Shopmont, for her lucid Notes on Sociophonology, and to yourself, for publishing this piece. It is a rare privilege to be allowed to read like-minded observations on this most vexing issue of grammatical and phonological sexism.

On the specific matter of vowel height correlating with social standing, I wish to confirm my esteemed colleague’s suspicion that only primitive societies will eschew phonemic justice. My own research reveals that Scandinavian countries, reputed for their absence of overt sex demarcations, have predictably succeeded in eradicating patriarchal vocalic iniquity from their languages. In Swedish, for example, the female-bound pronoun and determiner hon, hennes rank vocalically higher than their male-bound counterparts han, hans, respectively.

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Sir,

Eradicating overt sex demarcations is our thing too: we are all for promoting degenderated language uses. The latest piece of evidence is in a recent issue, where we take “He” to mean “Each player”. Like you, we believe that claiming that “He” is a sexist form of reference is a sexist form of sexism.

Oi!

I saw in a recent issue that that rapscallion Allen Halfermain is using the “L.E.A.” honorific after his name. He has not paid his dues in over two years, and as such is no longer a member in good standing of the League of Extraordinary Archaeologists. Please let me know where I may find him, so that I can beat out of him that which he owes us.

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Dear Shislock’s Brother,

Due to an unfortunate contractual error, we paid Prof. Solvi T. Perverbum—the principal author of the article you are referring to—by the word. He took the substantial cash payment we made and has retired to a tropical island paradise, cut off from the wider world. He was our only contact among the authors of and contributors to that article. Sorry.

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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.