First, gentle reader, I must indulge in a bit of soap-box exposition. Last summer, after a long freelance relationship, I came to be employed by SpecGram full time, under the direct

حوامتي ممتلئة بأنقليسون — Arabic

supervision of Slave-Driver Slater. So, of course, I cranked out two fabulous articles for the next two issues. But then I missed my deadline for the January issue by, like, six and a half minutes. Slater not only dumped me from the January issue, but claims to have forgotten my regular spot in the lineup and was only able to “squeeze in” ³/₄ of a page or so from me this time. This kind of authoritarian bullying I expect from McBastard, but Slater has usually acted as if there were some shreds of his humanity still intact. I temporarily lost my Linguistic Anthropologic Monograph Endowment’s Bizarre Grammars of the World Series grant, and I had to scale back the current article from a fabulous 17 pages with full-color charts to the mere shadow of its former self you have before you now. All told, though, I suppose it could have been worse —C.S.

In the course of several months of anthropological and linguistic data collection among native speakers of BizSpeak, a degraded and virulent offshoot of English used by

Ilmatyynyalukseni on täynnä ankeriaita — Finnish

mentally deficient holders of MBAs and their ilk, I noted several disturbing trends. Most obviously, modern dialects of BizSpeak have developed an unnatural affinity for terms in CamelCase (a pleasantly self-referential term for a despicable act of orthographic heathenism) and have continued in their eternal love affair with TLAs (“Three Letter Acronyms”, another amusingly recursive label for a symptom of severe cognitive defect). More importantly, there is a disturbingly clear trend inversely relating the number of project-specific TLAs and the success of the project, using even the most shallow success criteria, such as not having the entire project team fired, or fired upon, in the case of military contractors in certain Banana Republics.

While the data is clear, its interpretation is not. My theory, which is of the highest quality, is that the cognitive load of interpreting too many semantically opaque TLAs eventually causes projects to collapse under their own mental weight. Of course, the proximate cause of a project’s collapse is almost always some other external manifestation: embezzling, general incompetence, earthquake. However, the likelihood of such collapse shows a 98.5% correlation with the percentage of

Τὸ χόβερκράφτ μου εἶναι γεμᾶτο χέλια — Greek

possible TLAs that have assigned meanings for a project—a tightness of correlation that is unheard of among manufactured business statistics, except at Enron. While correlation does not show causation, or at least that is what The Man would have us believe, I fear for what the obvious, and obviously correct, interpretation foretells for the English language. Text messaging, chat rooms, and internet message boards have already been shown to degrade the literary skills of pre-teens and young adults. I fear that their gratuitous acronym-mongering will lead to the eventual downfall of the entire English Language!

Tentative Conclusions

More research is necessary to unravel the intricacies of this system. Said research will require more and abundant funding. Especially after Slater lost me my LAME grant! [Whatever. Suck it up and drive on! —Eds.]

Claude Searsplainpockets

Somewhere in Corporate America

	“Weee!”—The First/Second Singular/Plural—Christopher Wood
	A Braille Orthography for tlhIngan—Stovepipe Wells-Jensen
	SpecGram Vol CLII, No 2 Contents