Dear Speculative Grammarian,

If those fine fellows at the CLAP were to extend their system beyond the limits of kinship systems, they could place the whole of language on a logical, or even philosophical basis. Hopefully some linguists of real character will be able to take up the challenge.

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Dear John-Boy,

We’ve heard rumors from one of our more reliable sources—Jorge Luis of the Borg—that such a system is being developed by a group of philologists and philosophers in China. It is to be entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Language, and the first draft is scheduled to be completed in June—or possibly July if there are unexpected delays—of 2086.

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Dear Weirdos,

I read your recent duograph (and while I am offended in the abstract by such an ugly hybridism, I accept its use as necessary for distinguishing your work from bigraphs, which are much more rigorous, and digraphs, which unlike your work are actually necessary to language) and have the proper legal standing to prohibit its use. When my wife Amber’s son Mica married Garnet, a single mother, it made me a step-step-grandfather to her daughters Crystal and Beryl, which personal legal status I have trademarked as the Texas Two-Step Grampa™; indeed, as I am the only Texas two-step grandfather who does not know the dance, this was necessary for legal reasons to protect my personal brand. (Brands aren’t just associated with cows in Texas—sometimes they’re necessary to protect us stallions against jackasses like yourselves.) Were your proposal to take root, this title would be rendered archaic, and therefore on the grounds of possible trademark dilution I have filed for you to cease and desist posthaste, immediately, right away, utterly, completely, and 100%.

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Dear Rocky,

You can’t trademark a legal status. More than that, our legal counsel Scrum Diddly & Dumm assure us that with a sufficiently large retainer they can convince enough judges that your trademarked title constitutes a state-awarded monopoly that it can be overturned on the precedent of Marbury v. Madison or McCulloch v. Maryland or maybe Gibbons v. Ogden—we’re actually not sure which, but they certainly were—and assured us they could “marshall” sufficient evidence (marshall, get it? haw haw! you’d better get it, because we’re already laughing to the bank and you might as well get some fun out of the process) to strip that title from you faster and more painfully than a band-aid torn off a scab on an unsplinted compound fracture—like, say, of the legal legs you don’t have to stand on. If you don’t mind some free advice, just go learn the dance already: You might have some fun in the twilight of your wasted life, you might for once give pleasure to others, and you’ll remain a Texas two-step grampa even though there’s neither distinction nor glory in such a sad fact.

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Dear Eds,

Is there an academia version of Jones’s kinship system? During my PhD, I had two senior supervisors and three second supervisors. I want a term for the students now supervised by someone who was my second supervisor but who wasn’t that when I finally submitted.

Also, I want a word for the boothmate of someone I shared an interpreting booth with.

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Dear Χ. Ψ. Ω.,

It seems that “second supervisee, once removed” and “boothmate-in-law” are the obvious candidates.

Cari grammatici speculativi,

I confess to not having learned Jones’s Pseudo-Psiblings™ system beyond a few bits and pieces, but I do recommend one emendation. The definition of ex-, meaning “formerly, by marriage, but no longer, as the result of divorce”, should also cover annulment.

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Dear ρ-hypnol,

This topic became a matter of fierce debate among the senior editorial staff. Two camps quickly emerged: those who felt that annulment essentially retcons a marriage out of existence, and those who felt that while that may be theoretically true in the ecclesiastical realm, it did not hold, practically speaking, in the temporal realm. The only consensus was that terminological improvements are indeed hard to accept.

Rather than continue the philosophical debate, we devised an experiment. A couple dozen random interns were let go, half fired, half “annulled” (i.e., all history of them ever having worked for SpecGram erased, including all of their pay, for the ones who received pay). Afterward, we asked them all whether they felt like they are now “ex” employees or not. Alas, none would take our survey, so the matter is as yet still unsettled.

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Dear GermCaps,

I’ve managed to skim most of Pèl-Roig, et al.’s follow-on to Jones’s brilliant article, and I’ve discovered that step should pair with pest, rather than with the authors’ proposed red. The anagram is more evocative.

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Be silent and listen, Sparely Diuretics:

Your letter has angered and enraged the entire editorial board. Such resistance to the ancestries of modern thought! Reactive rather than creative! Your doctrinarism is nought but an unfair discriminator! Your nonuniversalist involuntariness elicits declamations of anecdotalism. Having triangulated and discounted your adulterating deductions, the undefinability of such cornucopiate re-occupation is unidentifiably and stationarily antiroyalist! There is no place in nondialectic or even coincidental discourse for your obscurantist subtractions nor your computerised pseudometric.

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Dear Eds,

After reading Trey Jones’s Pseudo-Psiblings, I have suggestions for terminological improvements! In particular, we need to distinguish between paternal and maternal uncles and aunts. There’s a very easy way to do that. Let’s label them for the moment pat-uncle₁, pat-uncle₂, mat-uncle₁, and mat-uncle₂ and just call these uncle₁, uncle₂, uncle₃, and uncle₄, which are to be read as “wunkle,” “tunkle,” “thrunkle,” and “funkle.” The corresponding aunts are “waunt,” “taunt,” “thraunt,” and “faunt.”

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Dear %,

Obviously, a maternal uncle₂ named Simon gets an additional gar- prefix.

Would the cremains of a cremated uncle be a carbuncle? And—by obvious analogy—a dieting uncle a nocarbuncle?

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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.