The Essence of Holiday Cheer
A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief
Many modern Christmas rituals are the creolized result of a cultural calquing of earlier pagan rites—and they are perhaps more lively, though less authentic, than the reconstructed Indogermanischen Urlaub; and certainly much less pitiful than the paronymous neologisms of Festivus and Holiday as celebrated by the Speculative Grammarian peasants (i.e., the interns and the lesser editorial entities).
What this holiday season needs, of course, is a good dose of cheer. And nothing provides good times like properly and professionally distilled and abstracted chemical essences—we’re talking archiphoneme-like purity and strength. To this end, we have contracted the services of one Carl Wornkey, Ph.D., whose previous work in biochemico-linguistics is (or should be) well-known to readers of SpecGram and the general public alike. The result, a distillate of pure holiday cheer, is a deceptively simple molecule, pictured here.
Its iconic shape at once encapsulates the character of the yule wreath while polysemously incorporating—via proprietary chemo-cabalistic processes provided by happy holiday sub-contractor Ph. Isaacs, N.V., Ph.D.—a certain special Kringlian shibboleth-cum-incantation. The results are a delicious, delightful delicacy.
Also, for some reason, this compound seems to make philosophers of language wax poetic about the Morning Star and the Evening Star, though only in proximity to the cover of this issue. What they say is true: ¡¡Language weirds!!
