Dear SpecGram,

A large number of my students recently indicated on a test that the word knight starts with a voiceless velar stop. The recent “ØrθógʀAɸΥ Nightmares” cartoon is far too apt.

Dear T.K.O.,

Sorry to hear about your student’s knight-related problems. Maybe it’s a voiceless airstreamless velar stop with zero pressure differential across the closure—so, y’know, you just make the closure as a symbol of respect before pronouncing the rest of the word.

Dear Eds,

I was shocked and disgusted by the recent plagiarism charges levied against SpecGram. I mean, who do those people think they are, to impugn the character of the Greatest Linguistics Journal of the New Millennium™? Also, it seems a little dodgy that the specs for the Copytron 3000 are basically M.A.Y.N.A.R.D.++ Everything is incremented by “at least one”. Did they plagiarize the computational capabilities of the AutoGrammatikon™?

Dear Fanny,

Those bastards! It was good of you to notice^* the similarity between the two systems—though M.A.Y.N.A.R.D. is both smarter and better looking. Actually, we knew this was coming—the Grammar Entelechy has fallen on hard times of late and, taking a page from the patent troll playbook, is now threatening trumped-up plagiarism charges against those who won’t settle out of court. We ignored them, and they responded by paying us to publish their tripe-laden propaganda. (Clearly, they need to re-think their automated advertising processes—ha!)

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 Sirs:

I write to you in an appeal to your better natures as cultured and civilized citizens. Our great nation is a laughing stock, both within its borders and outside them, because of the failure of so many of our public figures to pronounce “nuclear” correctly.

Linguists have gone on record as stating that the cause of this failure of education and grace is due to the great number of English exempla with -cular and similar forms versus far fewer with -clear. I therefore urge you to change the name of your publication to Specleative Grammarian. Please, think of the children!

Dear Hurdy Gurdy Murdy,

We share your understandable deep concern for the situation, and agree that something must be done. However, we cannot legally be the ones to do it. A long series of protracted legal battles has left us with only a narrow range of names—formal and nick—with which we may self-appellate.

Settlements with the glam rock physics journal Nuclear Glammarian, the now defunct band SpecGlam, the well known ovine celebrities Spek Ram and Spek Lamb, stratificational linguist S. Lamb, and several manufacturers of speedcams have left us no room for deviation or even derivation.

Dear Eds,

I recently found a downloadable copy of Heyókȟa Wakȟáŋ’s article concerning proper file naming and formatting on the author’s website. The file name was “finapr1127782.doc”, though it was actually a L^AT_EX file. Why would the author violate his own pro-social principles in naming the file?

Dear T-Rex,

We wondered the same thing, and we tried to ask Dr. Wakȟáŋ, but he isn’t taking our calls. It turns out that he’s actually a big fat jerk, and the primary purpose of writing this article was to make it abundantly clear that he has very little respect for any of his colleagues.