Meet the SpecGram Editors

In response to a decades-long demand to lift the veil of near-anonymity behind which the editors of Speculative Grammarian live, lurk, and work, we have begrudgingly agreed to provide publicly for the very first time a series of brief biographical sketches of select editors. Those editors with multiple outstanding federal warrants for their arrest on charges of felonious articulation, transporting underage girls across state lines for immetaphorical purposes, and impersonating an officer of the International Phonetic Association have been excluded, upon advice from our attorneys. The first two biographical sketches are below.

Name: David J. Peterson
Title: Consulting Editor
Birthdate: January 20, 1881
Areas of Research: Ornithological Semantics, Morphomogy, Theoretical Linguodynamics
Turn-ons: paper animals, animal statuary, paper made of animal hides, fake animal hides, paper made from fake animal hides, and bodices
Turn-offs: frameworks, organizations, satirical linguistics, satire in general, and paper made from imitation fake animal hides

Biographic Snapshot: David J. Peterson sprung fully clothed from the forehead of a felled carpetbagger on January 20, 1881. He spent the next seventeen years of his life as a failed wandering minstrel in Albany, Georgia (failed because he never wandered from Albany). On February 18, 1898 his life was threatened by a wayward linguist who forced him to write a paper on an obscure framework dealing with the semantics of bird wings. The publication of the resulting paper made Peterson an international linguistic superstar overnight, and he spent the next fifty or so years resting on his laurels (and on the couches of starstruck Southern belles eager to learn more about his “ideas”). By the mid 1950s, though, his star had fallen, and despite a stray publication here and there, the doors to academia (and the bed chambers of countless damsels) were now closed to him. Determined to seek vengeance on someone, Peterson turned his attention to Speculative Grammarian: the source of all his troubles, he decided. He barged into their offices, breaking pencils and overturning coffee pots, until the managing associate editor in chief in training reluctantly gave him the title “Protector of the Horses”. Several years later, when Peterson learned that the managing associate editor in chief in training had no power to grant such a title, and that it was, therefore, meaningless, he surreptitiously stole into the SpecGram compound during nap-time (two p.m. to eleven p.m.), broke into the office of a soon-to-be former Consulting Editor, and has refused to leave ever since. To appease him, SpecGram Conciliatory Services presents him a barrel of mead and the latest issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine every month.

Mikael Thompson was born, whereabouts unknown, on 14 Jan 1932 into a distinguished lineage of academically-excluded scholars and orthographic reformers of Welsh and Teutonic extraction. He first made a name for himself by securing the publication of such earlier family manuscripts as his great-grandfather Kristopher Thompson’s C.P.E. Bach: Esthetic Scoundrel, Family Traitor, and Arrant Wastrel, Being an Annotated List of his Works, with a Brief Account of his Life and Crimes (1823), his grandmother Konstance Aniseed Thompson’s Theosophy and the Ether Theory: Contemporary Obscurantism in the Light of Modern Science (1887), his uncle Klarence Thompson’s The Surreptitious Celts of Cornwall and the Irish Fifth Column (1922), and his father Kaldwell Kinkaid Thompson’s Logical Positivism, Fructophilia, and Free Silver: A Program for Today (1942). Thompson graduated from Indiana University at Lower Possum Trot (a claim disputed by several registrars) in either 1952, 1955, or 1956 with a degree in either linguistics, philosophy, or comparative literature, and soon achieved world fame as the leading linguistic sciuridologist of his generation. He is currently in abeyance in an undisclosed location authoring several works due to be suppressed by several major university presses in the next decade.

	Letters to the Editor
	On Neoplatonism and Fodor—Athanasious Schadenpoodle and Epiphanios o Phainomenos
	SpecGram Vol CLIX, No 3 Contents