Letters to
the Editor
Dear Eds,
I demand you retract your “news bite” on your retraction award. Have you forgotten that shortly after publishing my Mid-September monograph entitled “Nominative-Accusative Language Speakers Are Richer, Smarter, and Better Looking: Why Everyone Should Speak English”, you unceremoniously erased all mention of it from the web? Fortunately, I resubmitted it to a journal of political economics, where it won a Gold Trust-But-Don’t-Verify Award for Plausibility, not just the Silver award that is given to all of their papers upon receipt of the page charges. Based on all the discussion it generated, it has had a lot more readers (note: plural!) than it did at your piddly journal.
Miffed,
Annie Connie Myst
Professor of Literature, Ornithology, Statistics, Economics, and Religion
Southern North Dakota Community College, East West Fargo Campus
✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢
Dear Ms Mffd,
We beg, please don’t overreact:
We will (so as not to detract
From our grand score of zero)
Gladly laud you a hero:
Your article we’ll de-retract.
❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦
Dear Eds,
As leading lingua-archaeologists, we were interested to read your recent piece on a possible connection between the Bilabial Angel of Mwah and the Lateral Angel of La-la-la-la-la. Do you feel that latter (or indeed the former) had any role in the recent Oscar ‘shenanigans’ where the excellent, indeed ground-breaking film La La Land was traumatically denied the Oscar recognition that it most assuredly deserved?
Drs Larrissa ‘Lah-lah’ and Larry ‘La La’ Lantwerp
President and Vice President of the Los Angeles Lingua-Archaeologists (LALA)
Lower Ashville, LA
✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢
Dear Lolly and Loofah,
No-no-no-no-no.
❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦
Dear Editors,
I was shocked and embarrassed to see the lacuna in your recent news article on the Great Vowel Shift. Any smelly (not so) freshman could tell you that the consumption of spicy food led very quickly to the importing of Indian and Mexican cuisine. Faced with these deliciously unfamiliar foodstuffs, poor English-speaking digestive systems found themselves uttering rectal plosives and related phonemes, which led to this being christened The Great Bowel Shift.
I can’t believe that such a September journal as yourselves could miss this.
Yours in craic,
Dr Mephistopheles N. Testine
✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢
Look, (Beelze)Bub,
Leave the Month Seven of Nine out of this. It’s a perfectly good month, though it has been having a bit of an identity crisis as a result of global warming.
As to the shifting of bowels, you would perhaps find a more receptive audience in Speculative Gourmetician.
❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦
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.
