A Lamentable Llacuna of Lady Llinguists

A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

It was a dark and stormy night; the words fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when they were checked by a violent gust of writer’s block which swept through the mind (for it is in the Editor-in-Chief’s office that our scene lies), rattling along the cortex, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the neurons that struggled against the darkness.

Réseau franco­phone de socio­linguis­tique, June 2019, for their Congrès 2019 motto: “Langues de valeur et valeur des langues.” Chiasmus of the Month July 2018

Such was the tableau as I struggled to compose this month’s Letter from the Editor, the very one you are reading now. But my mission became clear as I cast my mind back to a decade ago, when I composed the July 2008 Letter from the Editor, taking note of the first woman to appear on the cover of SpecGram in its modern era—Lucy Lloyd. It was, embarrassingly, about six and a half years later that the next woman—Alice Kober—appeared on the cover of SpecGram, though since then we’ve been fairly consistent in alternating between male and female linguists (and linguist-adjacent scholars).

As I noted back in 2008:

Typically, the [pre-2015] featured linguist (or philologist, lexicographer, etc.) is fairly well-known, fairly interesting, or fairly funny looking. For a while, fairly impressive facial hair was also a fairly important criterion. All featured linguists have also been fairly dead for a fairly long while at the time of their appearance on the cover.

I also suggested that future featured linguists—male or female—should be “fairly famous, fairly dead, and fairly easy to find a picture of.”

We seem to have almost run out of Lady Llinguists—as we styled Lucy Lloyd, all those years ago—who fit our new-but-similar criteria. So, if you know of an interesting woman who was a scholar of language, who died at least fifty years ago, and for whom an image is likely available (preferably obviously unencumbered by copyright), please let us know! If all you have is a name, we’ll take that, too—the research interns are always in need of new hobbies. (.)

	Letters to the Editor
	SpecGram Vol CLXXXII, No 1 Contents