Eds.—

I saw your front page teaser “Needs more copula” (Vol. CLXV No. 1) and immediately realized you were chumming for word trolls who might jump at the opportunity to pop off about encouraging the use of fornicating action words... but I am above sophomoric bodily function humor. Sorry.

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’i, J—

We’re not looking specifically for word trolls, though mytholingual creatures of all types are welcome at SpecGram.

In fact, the tagline “Needs More Copula” is an homage to the great satirical linguist Christopher Walken and his famous performance piece titled, in the original Italian American, “Needsa Mora Cowbella”.

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Esteemed Éditeurs,

Schadenpoodle’s classification of Academicus (in issue CLXIII.1) as prokaryotic is pro-idiotic and completely unsubstantiated by any credible research. The relatedness of minimalistici with both Neoplatonicus and Functionalisticus is best explained by (normal, natural) hybridization. The current relative uniformity of minimalistici indicates that most if not all are F1 hybrids. Whether or not this is indicative of hybrid sterility remains to be seen—a significantly more varied F2 generation would answer the question resoundingly!

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Dear B.O.,

Your thesis smells a bit rotten. What would formants have to do with anything? The idea just doesn’t resonate with us.

Dear Eds,

While reading the Supplemental Letter to the Editor accompanying “Why Princes are not Scribes, and the Rat Eats Grain” I suffered an acute overexposure to the works of Julian Jaynes. For better or worse, it got me thinking.

Does anyone take Jaynes seriously? Couldn’t you deal with just about everything he talks about by saying that it was common for people to talk about hunches or compulsive urges as being the imperfectly-understood voice of spirits, etc., instead of saying they were having actual auditory hallucinations? I mean, being Southern, I’ve encountered a number of very religious people who will tell you that God tells them to do specific things, and I don’t think they’re hallucinating or even particularly crazy; they’re just interpreting a feeling as a different kind of voice, because that’s how the community talks about that kind of thing. No drastically oversimplified left-brain/right-brain shenanigans mixed with “they’re all schizo” claims necessary.

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Dear Rev. Run DMC,

Our good friend Equus Q. Quagga has recently developed an alternate theory to explain such auditory hallucinations: It wasn’t their right hemispheres at all; the overabundance of phonotronic energy in the early human environment simply resulted in the occasional “grounding” event, similar to electrical arcing, with some of these events being similar enough to actual speech to be mistaken for it. With the increase in population of language-using humans, the local phonotronic gradient dropped enough so that grounding events became rare. This also explains auditory hallucinations in arctic and antarctic explorers.

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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.