Dear Editors,

As British bees, we be^* concerned about the recent waspish proposal, hosted by your journal, to regularise the English verb be such that all of its forms in the present tense be be or be-derived. British bees be facing a number of genuine threats due to pesticide use, climate change, and intensive agriculture. We feel that the linguistic change your proposals propose would pose further challenges to the bee population which would be unwelcome at this time.

If you insist on going forward with these proposals could we ask that you consider adopting the orthography bea so as to differentiate what would be an increasing frequency of be-s in English corpora from the decreasing number of bees in English nature. That at least might take some of the sting out of this initiative. You will be aware that John Lennon, et alia, kindly adopted this strategy re The Beatles at the request of the beetles. The Volkswagen company, manufacturer of the famous Beetle, did not, and no beetles (or bees; solidarity, arthropodae!) have bought Beetles since 197-bee.

If you persist in your ambition to regularise English, perhaps consider broadening the [± human] distinction within relative pronouns (i.e. ‘The human [who ...] ...’ versus ‘The bee [which ...] ...’) so as to maximise the distance, linguistic if not, alas, ecological, between our two species.

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Dear bees,

Buzz off!

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Dear Eds,

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Dear Jules,

We are very disappointed in you, young lady. First off, it is completely inappropriate to plagiarize the works of Bacon and Marlowe the way you have without giving credit where credit is so obviously due. Given your (alleged) youth and inexperience, citing the barf of Stratford-upon-Avon would have been seen as a good-faith—though ultimately unacceptable—attempt.

Second—and vastly more importantly—you have referred to Speculative Grammarian as an ezine. An ezine! The premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics is no mere zine—whether “electronic” or “cybernetic” or “interwebzian” or whatever other degenerate technophilic nomenclature is de rigueur among the young these days.

Go to your room and think about what you’ve done! And we had better not hear of you communicating with that awful Montague boy, either!

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Dear Sirs:

While I have made my grumbling peace with your impurist bastardizations of Greek in the past, once again you have gone too far. In your February issue, one of your number perpetrated the gawd-awful solecism “the twin hegemons of money and technology.” The use of “twin” requires the use of the dual. Thus, this must be “twin hegemone.” More to the point, however, one tires of your constant kowtowing to the hegemony of classical European civilization. In future, for a more multi-cultural flavor, please use 霸. Thank you.

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Dear Dr. Spork,

If we are to reject the hegemony of classical European civilization, should we not also reject the linguistic twin hegemone of English and Mandarin? Why not use អនុត្តរជន or 𐭇𐭉𐭊𐭌𐭅𐭍 instead?

To answer our own question—no, no we should not, and for the same reason we did not use 霸 or hegemone. And why is that? Because clarity.

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Dear Editors,

As have-nots, we object to your recent proposal to regularise has to haves. Now we have-nots don’t even have has. What else are you linguists going to take away from us?

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Dear Milton Friedman,

Our studies show that by standardising inflectional output in the linguistic economy in this way, more morphemes will become available per capita, which should result in a morphemic (and probably lexical and syntactic) trickle-down effect, thus enriching all levels of society with all levels of the linguistic system.

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Dear Eds,

Please stop Freddie from picking on me.

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Dear Frankly Disappointing,

Go and hang some washing out; you’ll never write for SpecGram again!

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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.

	Behind the Scholarship—How the Satirical Linguistic Sausage is Made—A Letter from Editorial Associate Associate Editor Contributing Editor Senior Editor Jonathan Downie
	University News
	SpecGram Vol CLXXXVII, No 2 Contents