I have just been informed that during this last month one Silas O’Toole, a dedicated abstractionist known apparently to his linguistic colleagues as “Rules” O’Toole, in a paper delivered to the Linguistic Circle of Wyoming, proposed deriving Middletown from Moses with “only eighteen ordered processes.”

I will not dignify these “rules” by repeating them here; O’Toole obviously takes us for a bunch of low-watt bulbs. Who, blown by what ghastly winds of theory, is going to believe, outside of Wyoming at any rate, that from five segments you can get eight? Forms do not attract matter to them like black holes in the course of their derivations; rather they lose matter, like shrinking stars.

I have therefore proceeded to invert O’Toole’s analysis and derive instead Moses from Middletown; there are two possibilities. (To be sure, the first alternative leaves the issue of accretion vs. loss somewhat moot.)

I. A naive solution.

		//midltawn//
-idltawn Deletion		m
-oziz Insertion		moziz

This solution definitely has the advantage of simplicity, but the rules seem somewhat ad hoc. The second solution posits rules which are or will be well-motivated either (a) now or (b) later:

II. A sophisticated solution.

		//midltawn//
d-Assimilation		milltawn
l-Deletion		miltawn
l-Deletion schon wieder mal		mitawn
Spirantization		misawn
Voizing		mizawn
Monoflippinphthongization		mizon
Vowel Harmono		mozon
Syncope		mozn
Anglo-Frisian Brightening		<:->
n-Assimilation		mozz
Epenthesis		moziz

	Letters to the Editor
	Shhhhhhh! Don’t Tell Anyone—An Anthropological Linguistic Study of the Hallucinogenic Language of the Noyd—Claude Searsplainpockets
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