The Joy of Deadlines

A Letter from Executive Editor Keith Slater

Dearest Readers: We know you’ve had this experience, too. You sit uncomfortably in an airport, on something vaguely resembling a chair—the only option for perching your posterior within reach of the power outlet you’ve managed to locate behind a potted plant. It’s not comfortable.

No attention can be spared for comfort, though. You are on your way to a conference, and your paper isn’t finished. If your flight is on time, you’ll reach your destination at one a.m., and your talk is scheduled for nine a.m., which might leave you enough time to photocopy a handout at Kinko’s in the morning, if they open early. And if you can find them.

Costas Canakis, 2015, “The desire for identity and the identity of desire: language, gender and sexuality in the Greek context,” Gender and Language 9:1. Chiasmus of the Month January 2016

The pressure is intense, but you love it. What, after all, can compare with the joy of sharing your insights, your discoveries, your deepest musings, with the assembled company that will greet you in the morning? They are the like-minded, the fellowship, those who love language just as you do, the rare convocation of abstruse intellectualism in which you swim like a fish, belonging for a few days to those around you. You will not begrudge them a few moments of adrenaline-charged discomfort. You love them too much for that.

We at SpecGram share your suffering and your joy. Not that we finish papers on the way to conferences. No, we are too busy for that. Too busy writing linguistic satire, too busy composing joy for you and your students, too busy observing our field, and commenting on it, to participate.

But like you, we love it. We love the rush of deadlines. We love the bad airport chairs, the low salaries, the reheated ramen noodles, the accolades for a job well done.

And really, we get all that. Recently, even the hate mail has slowed down, and we got two or three positive reviews last year alone.

Like you, we’ve got it made. And we’re thankful that with you, we’ve got it made together.

	Letters to the Editor
	SpecGram Vol CLXXV, No 1 Contents