Ἐπιστολὴ πρὸς Γλωσσολόγους
A Letter from the Managing Editor
The title of this month’s letter from the managing editor is in Greek. It is thus not because it necessarily needs to be, but as a form of passive-agressive protest1 against the rampant encroachment of so-called “technological innovation” upon the academic and intellectual sanctity of this august journal. My understanding is that it gives the vapidly monolingual, classically unschooled, techno-дураки fits to have to deal with non-Latin alphabets, especially in article titles. Ha!
The skilled craftsman and artisans who pour their blood, sweat, and tears into creating the print version of our journal have never complained. Neither the earliest copyist-scribes, nor the operators of the early manual printing presses, nor the operators of the later deafening mechanical printing presses, nor the electronic typesetters of recent decades have complained. Not a peep. They have quietly practiced new alphabets, carved new wood cuts, cast new letterforms, or acquired new fonts, as needed.
These nattering nerdy nincompoops of newfangled networked negativity yammer away about meaningless concepts such as microblogging, nanoblogging, picoblogging, social cloud computing, convergent remixed thought leader mash-ups, emergent semantically intelligent folksonomies, wikinomic reputation management, leveraged maximal cross-content impact ratios, increasing ambidextrously adherent navigation trajectories, and tweets.
As a result of their buzzword-drunk ramblings, I have been forced by the board of directors of the joint-parent company (Escola Modista Editora e Distribuidora Ltda.) of our publishing enterprise to launch two campaigns. The first, as dictated by said board, is to make mention of several SpecGram-related activities taking place on the internet.2 To wit:
The second, related campaign, will be one to undertake a forced buy-out of EMEeDL’s stock in our physical and electronic publisher, so as to prevent such atrocities as the first campaign from re-occurring in the future.
With that, I offer hearty congratulations to the Chiasmus of the Month Award winner for July 2010, Pierre-Jean Rousselot!
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Pour l, la langue s’appuie par la pointe sur le palais et vibre par les bords. Pour r, elle s’appuie par les bords et vibre par la pointe.”
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Pierre-Jean Rousselot, 1891,
Les modifications phonétiques du langage étudiées dans le patois d’une famille de Cellefrouin (Charente). Doctoral Dissertation, University of Paris (p.26).
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Chiasmus of the Month
July 2010
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1 One wonders whether admitting to being passive-agressive negates the passive component. Ultimately it is of little concern. If called on the matter, I will claim that it was rather a “possessive-abessive postfix” to which I was referring.
2 Another flash-in-the-plan “technology” doomed to the scrapheap, if you ask me. My money is still on a Betamax resurgence!
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Letters to the Editor |
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SpecGram Vol CLIX, No 3 Contents |