It’s been a long, hard year in the offices of Speculative Grammarian, full of trials and tribulations. It has been especially hard on the interns; who, because of the flailing and failing global economy, have been forced (pretty much by me) to choose between having their unpaid positions replaced by a robotic coffee-and-Dead-Sea-Scroll-fetcher, and paying SpecGram for the privilege to work here. A few chose to leave. Most have chosen to take on the negative salaries, pushing SpecGram¹ out of the red. One intern, RoboFetch 2000, our unpaid machine intelligence exchange student from Toboria (we call him “Rob”), didn’t understand the question.

Financial matters aside, this has been a memetically challenging year for SpecGram. We’ve had to deal with article titles like “The complications posed to the comprehension and utterance of the English language with the advent of the influence and infiltration of the invading non-adjective and non-adverbial alien invaders in simple sentences: a look at English speech post-millennium-bug”, bilemmas, Lady Llinguists, an “Indeductivist Grapho-Synoptic Introduction to the Principles-and-Principles Prolegomena of a Theory of WH-Fixedness”, center embedding embedded centrally, too many “Prepositional Proposals”, and Godsylla.²

With all that rattling around in our collective consciousness, it’s amazing we were ever able to do anything, much less have an original, creative thought.³

Also, by the time you read this, the 2008 US presidential election will likely be over. Despite the fact that I’m writing this long before the election,⁴ I am certain that our guy, Yasuo Fukuda, did not win. As our political predictive models have correctly chosen 42 of the previous 43 US presidential elections (John Q. Adams surprised us all), I feel confident in predicting the outcome of the upcoming election: there will be massive electronic voting machine fraud, and one of the machines itself will be elected.⁵ Wearily we await the coming of 2009 and the brutal treatment humans⁶ will surely receive.

⁶ Note that our sociological models predict that the voting machines will treat computer programmers better than most other humans. Computational linguists will, as usual, be able to pass themselves off as programmers and computer scientists if no one looks too closely.

	Letters to the Editor
	SpecGram Vol CLV, No 2 Contents