Dear old dud(e)s:

You recently wrote, “none of this comes as any surprise to us, having spent a century in Houston.” Nosy minds want to inquire: Is that century collective, institutional, or (shudder of shudders) individual?

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Dear blowhard young punk:

The title of the referenced editorial must be read ironically. Words fly, but time there crawls—it has been suggested that the humidity in the air renders it too viscous for time to take flight, though others have pointed to the deleterious effects of the petrochemical effluents, and still others posit a New World variety of sleeping sickness. We ourselves lean towards all three. In short, who knows?

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Dear Eds,

I was severely disappointed to see that the Pumpkin of Iniquity managed to sneak a curse word into your poetry. You linguists and your filthy terminology! At least put some lipstick on that pig and refer to the language group as “Cucrapic”.

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Dear Swine Among Pearls,

Thic raps the stupid nail on its stupid head. You can take your crapty idea and flucr ap.

Dear Masters of Them That Know,

In a recent issue, Dr. Romanson wrote, “a zero full verb of existence.” So basically the full verb of existence is an empty morph? Huh?

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Dear Ken,

Finally, someone addresses us with the proper title! Now go wipe your nose.

Turning from the fulsomeness of your address to the fullness of your content: Form is emptiness, emptiness form—didn’t you ever learn that? Or even see Michael Nyman’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the greatest neurological opera evah?

Alternately, you have to think of the verb of being as the Hegelian synthesis of the thesis of fullness and the antithesis of emptiness, rather like Chomskyanism itself, which has often been referred to by either its proper name, flemptiness, or something similar, like “flimsiness,” by those whose phonotactics have not developed sufficiently to handle stop clusters in fully native speaker fashion.

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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.

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