Just SpecGrammy Things
From The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics

As the end of the year and its concomitant [+holiday] season approach, we at SpecGram want to encourage you to settle back and enjoy a little 1ST.SG.ACC time! Revel in all the one.. two.. many! little things that make being a fan of SpecGram so awesome!

Some of our favorite SpecGrammy things include:

Speaking of books and book-like long-form SpecGram material, no SpecGram material is more book-like than the actual SpecGram book, The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics.

Though this grooviest of books celebrated its coolio fifth anniversary this summer, it is still hella rad and totally dope in both its relevance and humor value, fam: the gnarly cover image is on fleek; the dope swag contained within is dank, yet lit; other, less YOLO-adjacent linguistics books are just salty because they are jelly. Oof! But rather than concentrate on those epic fails, we want to uplift our readers and fans, fam. #SquadGoals 💯

So, in pursuit of such goalsand being cognizant of the upcoming [+holiday] seasonwe have asked the elder statespersons of our post-Millennial/iGen/Gen Z social media interns (who also helped us yeet out all that swell vocabulary in the previous paragraph) to extract some meaningfully heart-felt passages from the Essential Guideones that truly, deeply spoke to them as linguistsand couch them in an appropriate popular “maymay” schemata. We had also asked for so-called “pop” melodies to be played along with the visual (re)presentations of the book quotes, but both the Copyright Interns and the Bandwidth Interns quickly quashed that quest. Killjoy spoilsport malcontents!

Nonetheless, the resultspresented beloware striking in their genuine profundity. They are also useful as the [+holiday] season looms. As so many of us know first-hand, getting good gifts as a linguist is often much harder than giving them. If you need to convince your friends and family that they can’t find you a proper gift on their own, send them one of the images below, and try to explain to them why it affects, excites, and inspires you. That’ll show ’em! Then recommend that they get you a copy of The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics. (If you alreay have a copy, then, first, thank you!, and second, sorry, your gifts are gonna suck again this year.)

More images will be added through the rest of 2018, just in case your friends and family are a little thick.

• If guilt is more your style, check out 2013’s Sad Holiday Linguists.

• If semi-positive reinforcement is your thing, check out 2014’s Because You Can’t Do Everything You Want for Your Favorite Linguist.

• If you know you're just going to have to take care of it yourself, check out 2015’s Hey Linguists!


Click an image for higher resolution. Page numbers are provided for our homies who have acquired a copy of the Essential Guide, and links to the free online source are provided for the rest of you posers.


See p. 199.

See p. 5.

See p. 192.

See p. 267.

See p. 207.

See p. 190.

See p. 71.

See p. 12.

See p. 195.

See p. 110.

See p. 311.

See p. 252.

See p. 11.

See p. 149.

See p. 152.

See p. 142.

See p. 269.