Dear SpecGram,

I’m writing to thank you for introducing me to the nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill and its symbol, the double-dot wide-O. It has been a great boon in my phonetics class.

The final exam in my class is a practicum in which students have to pronounce various sounds, most of which have been covered in class. In what started as a kind of secret experiment, we have the students wait at least five minutes before their exam in a room with “nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill” and “double-dot wide-O” written on the white board. Any student that makes a pig snort automatically gets an A on the final exam. If they laugh afterward, an A+.

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Dear Arby,

These are indeed the kind of students linguistics needs—clever, curious, competent, and comical. Be sure to send us the contact information for the laughers. There could be a SpecGram Associate Editorship in their future!

Dear Sirs,

While I have long considered your journal one of the world’s worst perpetrators and propagators of intellectual atrocities, the article by Skiffy Bafflegab that you published in the November issue (CLXXX.1) is the first actual human rights violation I have ever encountered in your pages. You have signally outdone yourselves.

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Dear Sir,

You should get your eyes checked. There have been several.

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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.