SpecGram Vol CLII, No 1 Contents Re: Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics—A Letter to the Editor—H I A W Papi, D. Litt, M. Phil (Oxon.), Ph. D. (Oxon.)

To Whom It May Concern

A Letter from the Managing Editor

We received a lot of mail in response to the SpecGram senior editor’s column in the last issue. To avoid further legal entanglements, we would like to offer the following clarifications:

  1. Although we regularly reject substandard submissions, even those authored by some of the sogenannte “guiding lights” of the field, SpecGram proudly subscribes to basic provision 226 of the Code of the American Association of Linguistics Journals, which states “we solemnly promise never to reject an article submitted by Noam Chomsky.” We hereby affirm that we have never knowingly rejected any Chomskian prose. (Or poetry, either.)

  2. We categorically deny ever having admitted that Tim Pulju exists. For that matter, we neither confirm nor deny the existence or contribution of any of our other putative editorial staff.

In this issue, we have quite a varied lot, including the longest letter to the editor we’ve ever printed (those of you writing letters longer than this can give up now—you know who you are). We are also beginning a new series, Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, which we hope will make some of the complex ideas in our discipline more accessible to interested non-specialists, children, and documentary linguists. Add a song, some news, a bit of lost literary linguistics, and the announcement of a new car from Psammeticus Motors to make this one of the most diverse issues ever. We hit another one out of the park, if we do say so ourselves!

“Verbing Weirds Language only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds.”
—John Lawler
As noted last April, much of 2006 was spent “enhancing” the length of each issue of SpecGram. Now that the “herbal supplement” that made such gains possible is no longer legally (or even illegally) available, we have been forced to halt our quest for ever greater length at sixteen pages per issue. To make up for this loss, we are increasing the frequency of publication from quarterly to bimonthly. Those of you who have some knack for arithmetic may realize that this reflects a 50% increase in overall volume per year.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Re: Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics—A Letter to the Editor—H I A W Papi, D. Litt, M. Phil (Oxon.), Ph. D. (Oxon.)
SpecGram Vol CLII, No 1 Contents