Which Tea You Should Be Drinking—A Guide by Linguistic Subdiscipline—Hitosarai Yōkai Ūron SpecGram Vol CLXXIII, No 2 Contents

Get Back to Work!

A Rebuttal from the Editor-in-Chief

What the tannic hell is going on here? I go on sabbatical for three weeks and I come back to all of this tea- and coffee-related nonsense! Unholy Chomskyan shibboleths! What is wrong with you people?

As an ardent achaudic acaffeinist—I partake of neither hot nor caffeinated beverages1—I don’t have any strong beliefs with respect to tea or coffee; I tend to drink and let drink.

Back to the topic at hand: linguistics—heard of it? It’s what we supposedly do around here. Of course, it is well known that, prototypically, a linguist is a machine for turning caffeine into unfalsifiable-but-publishable theoretical constructs,2 so coffee and tea are each integral parts of an effective work day at SpecGram, but they are supposed to disappear from the final product with nary a trace,3 not become the overt topic of discussion.

It’s like crossing lines, mixing levels, having non-binary trees, believing in subtractive morphology, writing an AI in COBOL, or thinking Chomsky is more a hindrance than a help to the field—it just isn’t done, at least not in polite company.4

Savages! You are all savages!5 SpecGram is not about tea or coffee, it’s about capturing that ineffable feeling that comes from discovering knowledge. Now get back to effing work!6


1 Bowing to culture and tradition, I will occasionally drink hot chocolate with my family, but I put so much milk in it that it is at best warm chocolate, and I like vanilla better anyway. I also have been known to drink Mt. Dew, but only for the flavor.

2 Things can get a little more snowcloney than that: “an X is a machine for turning Y into Z”, where X can be linguist/philologist/syntactician/etc., and Y can be caffeine/tea/coffee/pizza/beer/etc., and Z can be unfalsifiable-but-publishable theoretical constructs/papers/articles/syntactic frameworks/etc. You get the drift.

3 Well, okay, a phonologically null t or two would probably be tolerable.

4 Unless you have tenure.

5 Savages without tenure—except for Schadenpoodle, from whom we expect and accept such behavior.

6 Get your paperwork done by Friday and I may raise your annual performance review grade to a C-.

Which Tea You Should Be Drinking—A Guide by Linguistic Subdiscipline—Hitosarai Yōkai Ūron
SpecGram Vol CLXXIII, No 2 Contents