Hey fellow “linguists”—

It is embarrassing that you don’t label yourselves often enough as satirist. Many young learners could very easily get the wrong idea since you are just so elitist.

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SpecGram,

You guys are not very clear about how satirical you are. I fear that your influence could be only negative on blooming linguists.

I appreciate the humorous things such as the phonetics song, as I have an affinity for acoustic phonetics, but you need to properly label them as such! You can’t assume that you are T.S. Eliot and you are so elite that no one else can enjoy in your fun.

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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.

Dear Taeke,

Thanks for the lovely comments—so nice you wrote them twice.

On the off chance that your comments are sincere, note that the entire internet should come with a big caveat lector sign, but doesn’t. The internet is full of intentionally deceptive misinformation. We’re pretty upfront about who we are; the very first thing on our home page is this: “Speculative Grammarian is the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.” The claim may be grandiose, but the disclaimer is clear.

You’ve mistaken our collective idiosyncrasy for elitism. “Ha, making this weird little connection makes me laugh” is not the same as “Ha, making this obscure little connection makes me superior”, though the confusion is understandable. Other obscurity comes from age, not intent. You have to forgive references to Stratificational Linguistics, for example—they were only mildly obsolete when first made, lo, these many years ago. We still let some of the people from way back then contribute—and they are not getting any more hip with age. (Though they do have more hip problems.)

And we are certainly not elitist when it comes to taking submissions; so if you want to change the character of the content of SpecGram, you can do so by writing the kind of articles you want to see in our pages.