Letters to the Editor

Dear SpecGram, I found your reply to FS/Effie concerning the Doom/Punod manuscript to be patronizing, condescending, stilted, disfluent, and oddly formatted. That can mean only one thing: steganography! The first letter of each line spells out the words “the black copters”. When I re-formatted your reply in a fixed-width font, the rest of the message appeared in the 12th column: “are coming for you”: I hope Effie escaped unharmed. Sincerely, Ron H. Neely (no relation) —— Dear da-doo-Ron-Ron, As is well known by any well-informed practitioner of the delicate art of στεγανογραφία, messages sometimes show up where none was ever intended. The various erstwhile fashionable book codes more than amply demonstrate that. The message you found is an odd coincidence. The admittedly unusual formatting is the result of a broken composing stick used by an unfortunately hurried typesetter. There’s nothing to it. Just go on about your business, conspiracy nut! —Eds. ********** Dear Editors, Siva K. is right to point out that the transcription of a cow’s moo given in Rhodes (1994: 279) should be interpreted as [ʔm̰ɨ̰̃ː˩˨˩] rather than [ʔm̰ɨ̰̃ː˥˦˥]. However, he does not seem to be aware that in the last 15 years Californian cows have, for social reasons that I’ll not go into, been extending interrogative intonation patterns to declarative mugiencies. Further details may be found in my report “ ‘Up-mooing’ in central California”, to appear in the September issue of the Journal of the American Zoöphonetic Zaibatsu, which I will send to K. if you give me his contact details. Égʷhent Gʷṓm Zoöphonetics Research Institute Modesto, CA —— Dear ÉgʷGʷ, We’ve heard about this uptalk thing? We’re not sure we’re ready to buy it? Sounds like something someone made up? To make fun of Valley Girls? Totally? And now you claim the cows are doing it? Malarkey? Tripendicularly yours? —Eds. Dear Editors, Please find attached my submission to your estimable journal. The paper, now entitled “The probity of linguistic probability,” has been thoroughly revised once again, this time in accord with the suggestions which your secretarial staff outlined in rejecting the 43rd draft last autumn. You will note, I am sure, that I have paid scrupulous attention to their comments. I eagerly await notification of your acceptance of this paper. Sincerely, Professor Brian Yakashima-Gonzalez O’Connell Central Plains University —— Dear Brian, We are not interested in your paper. Please stop submitting it. It is not good. In fact, each draft got worse, until we stopped reading them. We will not publish this draft, nor will we read any future drafts. Fearing that you would disregard this rejection once again, we have decided to make it publicly. Perhaps your friends and colleagues, on seeing this, will be able to communicate more clearly with you than we have been able to. —Eds. ********** Dear Dr. Editor, I’m 20 years old and a linguistics undergrad. Last week, I found myself for the first time talking to a Spanish native speaker, and somehow I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I think I even became fluent. Does this mean I’m bilingual? I don’t know what to think of myself now—do I have tendencies towards both English and Spanish? You know, for people in general, being a bilingual is associated with frequenting shady code-switching clubs and such, but I swear I’ve never been to such a place! I feel very confused. Do you think bilingualism can be cured? Or are people born this way? I’ll be grateful for any advice in dealing with this situation! Embarrassedly yours, [real name withheld] P.S.: Please don’t tell my professors! —— Dear Bi-lingual Curious, You can’t let the world at large define who you are. In the United States, people like to label themselves and others as monolingual, with anything else being socially unacceptable. You’ll hear people say how they learned a smattering of French, German, or Spanish during an “experimental phase” in college. Some will admit to knowing a few words of Japanese or Swahili like it is some sort of perversion. In reality, most people in the world fall somewhere on the fluency spectrum in more than one language, and society doesn’t crumble. Just look at the decadent, liberal Europeans, many of whom speak several languages—including English—passably well. Ignore labels, and just be yourself. —Eds. ********** Speculative Grammarian accepts well-written letters commenting on specific articles that appear in this journal or discussing the field of linguistics in general. We also accept poorly-written letters that ramble pointlessly. We reserve the right to ridicule the poorly-written ones and publish the well-written ones... or vice versa, at our discretion.

	Annual Report to Shareholders, 2011—The Speculative Grammarian Editorial Board
	Zwicky Unretires Again—SpecGram Wire Services
	SpecGram Vol CLXII, No 2 Contents