Dear Eds,

In your August editorial, “Unmasking Editorializing in Linguistic Articles”, the Speculative Grammarian Committee on Preserving Linguistics as a Respectable Discipline wrote:

Here at Speculative Grammarian, we maintain a rigorous separation between facts about language and linguistics (to which we devote the bulk of each issue), and the opinions of our contributors (which are relegated to this editorial page or other, clearly-delimited sections of our august publication).

What are you talking about? There’s opinion all over the place in SpecGram. I love this journal more than several of my own children, but let’s get serious!

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Srsly,

Sorry for the typo that caused the confusion. It should have read, “clearly-delimited sections of our August publication”. We thought we’d try separating editorial from scholarship for the August issue in response to the recommendations of the Speculative Grammarian Committee on Preserving Linguistics as a Respectable Discipline. It didn’t really take.

Dear SpecGram,

In the August issue, in the “Unmasking Editorializing in Linguistic Articles”, you left out one important way to differentiate between Editorials and Serious Articles: Rigor. Why?

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Dear Dr. Stiffler,

Did you mean something like this?

Rigor: A primary purpose of Editorials is to persuade, so emotional appeals, logical fallacies, and ad hominem attacks are commonplace, unlike in Serious Articles, which... wait, we’re talking about the humanities, aren’t we? Never mind.

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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.