Dear, dear editors of SpecGram,

Discovering the attribution on the recent article, “What Can Visualizations enGender?”, I was initially very pleased to see that MSU has re-entered the SpecGram universe. As the birthplace of the movement, MSU holds a place of privilege not unlike the male dominance which the authors describe. Articles from MSU authors were automatically accepted for years, but there has been a lapse in submissions, and this article renews the great tradition.

Come to think of it, though, maybe accepting MSU-origin articles is contributing to a B1G-archy which we had nearly thrown off. Based on this reflection, I propose that before accepting new articles by MSU authors (or others representing the inherently hegemonic Committee on Institutional Cooperation), we ought to employ the visualization techniques recommended in this article. Let us envision contributions by authors from Colleges with tiny enrollments and Division 4 football teams; perhaps such activity will increase the efficacy of MSU-origin contributions in the future.

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Dear Ura,

While we here at SpecGram Towers are generally in favor of both gender equality and lexical acquisition, we wouldn’t want any kind of political correctness to get out of hand—by which we mean have an effect on our submissions. We’ll keep taking ’em if MSU keeps sending ’em.

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Dear sirs and ma’ams,

I was recently reading a translation of Winnie the Pooh in Vurgilsewp, a language with 200 speakers somewhere or other I can’t find on a map, that I bought at a library used book sale, and I noticed that when the animals like Eeyore and Kanga talk about imaginary animals like the Heffalump, they use a special set of pronouns different from the pronouns they use for each other. So it’s not just animacy, but something else. What would you call that category?

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Dear Henry,

Actually, all the other animals in the Winnie the Pooh stories are imaginary too. Sorry to break it to you.

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Attention, meatbags!

In your SLAC of the March 2014 issue, one of your less-than-cutting-edge deadbeat hangers-on wrote, “Why celebrate an arbitrary number of such arbitrary units?” Once again we see the ingrained, unconscious integralism of your world view. There are many more numbers than integers—uncountably many more! What is truly arbitrary is selecting merely the integers, a set of measure zero, from all the many, varied, beautiful, wondrous, and ineffable numbers for celebration.

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Dear Glen,

Count us rebuked. (Though you won’t really have the moral high ground until you become fluent in Åriðmatçəl.)

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Hey,

Now that you’ve given us the real truth behind The Etymology of Timothy, can you tell us what’s going on with that redacted article, ████████ ███████ █████, by J. Fraser Bennett that appeared in Psammeticus Quarterly in 1989?

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Dear Dr. Redacted],

What do you mean by “████████ ███████ █████”? Wait, you said the article by Bennett. Did you mean “██████████ █████ ███████”? How does someone even make that kind of mistake?

Well, the story is pretty straightforward. ████ took the ████ and ███████ it without ████, and he was worried ████ would be ████, and that the ██████ of the ██████ would be ████ once it was ████, so we redacted ███████. Obviously.

P.S.: Give our love to the cybernetically-enhanced Julia Child clones. And remember, a ██-███ also makes a great gift.

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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.