Dear Anachronistic Editors,

In issue CLXXVIII.3, Bull and Ochs use fin de siècle to refer to a time period they also label “the 1960s and 1970s”. While I understand that fin de siècle is not being used literally, I really struggle with describing the middle of a century as the end thereof.

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Dear Timey Tim,

How so very prescriptivist of you! How nice (late 13th C.) of you to send your comment. We’d like to give you a nice (1500s) explanation, but you might be too nice (c. 1400) to handle it, or too nice (late 14c.) to accept it. May we suggest a semantic dodge sometimes employed by one of our editors with his younger children? Pretend it’s Swahili and it means “decadent”—or, y’know, use a dictionary. That’d be nice (1769), quite nice (1830) indeed.

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Dear SpecGram,

I recently made a very clever acronym-related joke, and a (supposedly) good friend of mine decided to undercut me by pointedly pointing out the difference between acronyms and initialisms. I had to concede that he was technically correct, but it seemed like he was making jargony and frankly prescriptive distinction rather than favoring the more practical, descriptive usage. Please help me find the best way to tell him how wrong he is.

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Dominē Abbreviātiō,

Your friend—who seems to be very good—is technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. You, on the other hand, are a whiny little linguist. Don’t be that.

On the other hand, to any decent linguist, any sequence of letters is pronounceable as an acronym if you try hard enough.

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Dear Editors,

I have noticed that papers in your journal frequently include struck-out words, sentences, and even entire passages. If the author marked them for deletion, why do you not omit them?

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Dear Cardinal Rose,

Quality control.

Dear Eds, etc.,

I have noticed that recently, you have been repurposing old wartime propaganda posters and adding linguistic text to them. You aren’t planning an invasion, are you?

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Dear Dr. MiNiBun,

You’ve got your facts a little bit akimbo. In truth, our fine art restoration team has been working overtime to remove wartime paint and uncover the original linguistic slogans on these pieces. Our team of crack historians is still working on a unified account of the circumstances behind the creation of the images, but Franz Boas has not yet been entirely cleared...

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[An emerging trend / Is sure to send / Some around the bend. / But praise or curse, / For better or worse, / We’ve letters penned in verse. —Eds.]

Dear Sirs,

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Dear Q,

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Dear Sirs:

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Dear Insane Clown Posse,

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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.