“A Stratificational Approach to Making Macaroni and Cheese”—by Tim Pulju—Reviewed by Trey Jones SpecGram Vol CLXXI, No 1 Contents “Variation in the English Indefinite Article”—by Tim Pulju—Reviewed by Don Mueang Changi

“Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (Review)”
by Robert E. Lee

From Psammeticus Quarterly XVI.3, May 1989

Reviewed by Fædrus Ϙ. Χ. Plaid’oh

I have previously warned that Google, Wikipedia, and the Internet (Collateral Descendant of Lingua Pranca, October 2009) have the collective power to break each of us as individual scholars—much as my intellectual forefather Plato warned against the dangers of the now-necessary evil of writing.

However, in a small but significant way, we Speculative Grammarians and Lingua Pranksters have struck back by breaking Google and the internet.1 If you search, as you do, for lee review noam chomsky syntactic structures, one of the top results is the satirical masterwork that is Robert E. Lee’s three-decades–late (and now a quarter-century–old) tongue-in-cheek review of that work. It is quite relevant, relatively easy to find, and terribly misleading to the larval would-be student of linguistic history. Ahh, sweet vindication.2

You, as confidant of Speculative Grammarian, have the savoir faire and inside information necessary to enjoy the article for what it is, while the rest of the unwashed denizens of the internet think themselves very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.


1 Breaking Wikipedia is, frankly, beneath us: it is trivial to vandalize, and at least they are making an effort to do something useful—however misguided—unlike most of the rest of the cat-infested World Wide Web.

2 For spicy, try a vindaloo.

“A Stratificational Approach to Making Macaroni and Cheese”—by Tim Pulju—Reviewed by Trey Jones
“Variation in the English Indefinite Article”—by Tim Pulju—Reviewed by Don Mueang Changi
SpecGram Vol CLXXI, No 1 Contents