Not My President
A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief
Just a short while ago—on January 20, 2017—the final reverberations of a long and difficult election season were felt as a new president was sworn into office after one of the most unprecedented political campaigns in history. We are talking about, of course, the election of Arkhibuldinho Rasputinsky McFudgment (SpecGram Senior Junior Editor, Ret.) to the office of President of the SpecGram Junior Editor’s Union and Xenographōrium—official motto: J.E.U.X.—because life’s not just all fun and games!
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Eberhard Klein, Françoise Pouradier Duteil, Karl Heinz Wagner (eds.), 1991, Betriebslinguistik und Linguistikbetrieb, Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Chiasmus of the Month
February 2017
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Arkhie ran an unorthodox campaign. His campaign slogan, “Make Americanist /fənɛtɪk notešən/ Great Again!”—also known by its hashtag, #МАҒИԌА, inexplicably rendered, poorly, in mildly esoteric Cyrillic—was generally regarded as meaningless. He promised to build a theoretical wall between phonology and morphology, and to make the morphophonologists pay for it, as he claimed they’d been sending all their worst people—level mixers and morphome users—into linguistics. He vowed to temporarily ban physicists and biologists from entering the field, and to impose high tariffs on linguistics articles published in non-linguistics journals. He claimed to be committed to bringing back philology jobs. He assured voters that he’d withdraw from the LSA or at least renegotiate the terms of membership. He pledged a “full repeal” of the policy of stocking the SpecGram Towers junior editorial lounge first aid kit with Rasmus-Rask–themed bandaids, replacing the policy with a markedness-based alternative—the details of which remain unclear. He swore he’d cut funding for Planned Punctuation, which provides comma-placement advice to low-income junior editors. He gave his word that he would appoint a Senior Junior Editor to the Supreme Junior Court who would overturn ρ v. Word, the landmark decision by the Supreme Junior Court that guarantees interns access to text editors not developed by Microsoft. He went so far as to promise to bring back waterboarding of interns as an alternative to flogging. He even promised to never refer to the Editor-in-Chief as the “Supreme Leader,” despite doing so being contractually required by all interns, junior editors, middling editors, meddling editors, and all members of J.E.U.X.
It’s unclear why Arkhie felt the need to make all these outlandish promises, since many of them fall far outside the purview of the president, and because he was running unopposed for his eighth term.
Nonetheless, Arkhie is not my president... simply because I’m not a member of J.E.U.X. Though if I were I would not have been eligible to vote for him, since the office of the Editor-in-Chief itself confers upon the office holder “unrevokable unal citizenship” in the Carolingian Empire—for complex legal, historical, and orthographic reasons we needn’t go into.
