Dear Editors,

In a recent editorial article, you seemed to assert that no linguistic theory has ever persisted for more than twenty years. Leaving aside the obvious counter-evidence presented by those few individuals who continue to teach Relational Grammar, Tagmemics, and Government and Binding (among others), I would like to call your attention to Optimality Theory.

According to Wikipedia (accessed today), Optimality Theory “was originally proposed by the linguists Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky in 1993.” This disproves your assertion; as it is now 2015 (or possibly later, as I have heard that your editorial and publication processes border on glacial), OT has now been in existence for over twenty years. In fact, given the rapidity with which OT swept to prominence in the early days, it has actually been the dominant phonological model for more than twenty years already.

Please retract your patently untruthful claims, and thereby restore my good opinion of your publication.

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Dear Dr. Lowjist

Thank you for your pedantic attention to minor details. We are tempted to refer you to any number of good books on the use of hyperbole in linguistic theorizing—possibly you have even read Langacker’s work in this vein?

However, restraining ourselves from making such recommendations, we instead will simply defend our assertion by pointing out that, while OT was proposed as a theory of phonology, by the 15^th year of its existence (dating conservatively) it had become instead primarily a theory of syntax.

We trust that you are cognizant of the difference between these two subdisciplines.

Therefore, OT as a phonological theory did not in fact last even a full twenty years. The duration of its tenure within Syntax is still undetermined, but syntacticians as a class are an even more impatient lot than phonologists, so we don’t hold out much hope for a record here, either.

Dear Editors,

Neil de Veratte’s claims are ridiculous and unscientific, and based on intuition. However, we have fired up the Bigdatatron and found statistically significant correlations between a language’s robustness and its prescriptivism, its speakers’ production of butter, and its speakers’ production of unvoiced nasals. The last may be spurious, however. We would be willing to share this data with de Verrate for a small finder’s fee.

Of course, correlation is not causation, and it may be the case that robustness causes prescriptivism, rather than the other way around. Or it may be that increased butter production (and hence increased consumption) may lead to slipperier tongues and hence a need for corrective prescriptivism. We can also provide the experimental services needed to prove causation, if de Veratte is willing to pay for the kidnapping—er, “experimental de-patriation”—of a sufficiently large n₁ of native speakers of a sufficiently large n₂ of languages.

Also, to meet the needs of de Veratte’s proposal to introduce arbitrary changes, our record of success in these matters is unrivaled, and speaks for itself.

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Dear Valerie/Valencia/Valentina,

You ΓΧ types never give up do you? Haven’t you done enough weird/bad/undeserved things “both in Language and among languages”? Now you have to go after science/math/statistics?

On the other hand, statistics already has a reputation so weird/bad/deserved that you probably can’t do too much harm. You deserve each other.

Leave poor Neil alone!

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