All Hail the Romans—THoR, LOKI, and RAGNaROK (!??)

A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

Editor Emeritus Tim Pulju has been spending his emerital free time writing a history of Rome. In fact, he seems so sure that his book is the definitive work on the subject that he’s titled it The History of Rome, though admittedly he didn’t go so far as to bold the The in the title. Perhaps that’s only because—the book being about Rome—he decided to stick with the more etymologically Italian formatting.

Ivan A. Derzhanski, 2005, “On Dimin­utive Plurals and Plural Dimin­utives,” in Geert Booij, et al. (eds.), Morphology and Linguistic Typology, On-line Proceedings of the Fourth Mediterranean Morphology Meeting (MMM4) Catania, 21-23 September 2003. Università degli Studi di Bologna. Chiasmus of the Month August 2018

So, how did Speculative Grammarian Press come to publish a book on history? Well, of course, Old Man Pulju still wields an enormous amount of soft power in the halls of SpecGram Towers. He’s charming, eloquent, and persuasive. He also knows where all the bodies are buried. (Personally, I’ve always wondered why all of the conference rooms on the executive floors are named after grammarians and philologers, except for the Jimmy Hoffa Memorial Meeting room. Just sayin’.)

Given the inevitability of publication, we decided to lean into it and thus, for tax purposes, The History of Rome is a historical linguistics book that documents the early spread and development of the Romance languages; it just has a lot of historical digressions.

The author—not being the most culturally savvy supercentenarian on the block—hasn’t realized the significance of the book’s acronymic abbreviation: THoR. I’m working hard to convince him that Livy’s Orthœpic Koineizational Interdisciplinarities and Roman Archiphonemic Graphocentric Neologisms as Revealed Ontological Knowledge would make good titles for sequels. We’ll see whether he catches on—and whether he can crank out another book this century.

Also of note, the book was actually ready several months ago, but publication was held until July so we could announce it in this issue, which, like a certain Roman Caesar, is august.

See the ad for the book later in this issue for more details.

	Letters to the Editor
	SpecGram Vol CLXXXII, No 2 Contents