[Note: We recently “acquired” nearly a score of the mail sorting machines that have been decommissioned by the U.S. Postal Service this year, which allowed us to sort through a backlog of over a dozen lakh letters. As always, our bounty becomes your bounty. —Eds.]

Dear Sirs and Mesdames,

Regarding footnote 6 in your May editorial earlier this year, the official AΦA (American Φάρμακο-lɪŋɡwɪstɪks Association) guidance is that Xyntax has been deprecated as a sedative. Vowelium and Pronounzac have generally been considered to be safer and more effective.

However, our newly released and substantially improved X̄yntax is an excellent editorial sedative and sleep medication, with significantly fewer side effects than the original Xyntax.

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Dear Đarius,

Your x-rated letter is rather mean; you’re barred.

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Dear sirs,

A poem in a recent issue of your journal mentioned the phenomenon of light verbs. I write to ask if you can clarify this concept. I assume it refers to verbs like ‘enlighten’ and ‘lighten up’. Or perhaps ‘gleam’, ‘glimmer’, ‘glitter’ etc. Critically, you made no reference to ‘dark verbs’; are they, like dark matter, yet to be discovered?

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Dear UV,

What a shady question! We rummaged around in the dark corners of your letter but were unable to locate even the faintest shadow of a meaningful message. We have therefore consigned it to a black hole.

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Dear Editors,

I cannot endorse the belligerent use of diacritics proposed by Horace Hemingway. I recently experienced an attack of the diaeresis following a surfeit of coffee, and that’s an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies. Not even critics!

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Dear Mr. Butts,

Perhaps you could try diuretics instead? Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “peer reviewer.”

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Salvete, dudi dudaeque!

In your March issue, Francis Faraday writes, “What is an Austenian or Dickensian thee, thou and thine—or, worse, some coarse Prithee, gadzooks or verily from the pen of a Shakespeare, Milton or Donne, not yet half a millennium interred—to a ringing, vibrant, glorious Veni, vidi, vici or Senatus Populusque Romanus?” Or, for that matter, how does “Francis’s mom’s the town bike” possibly compare to “Mater Francisci glūbit squalidae Arcansae nepōtēs”? After all, “Omnia latine meliora sonos.”

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Dear Virgil-on-the-Ridiculous,

I am not the town bike (neither do I own a bike as I drive a Range Rover on weekdays and an Audi R8 on weekends); I am in fact the Executive Secretary to the SpecGram Editorial Board ... et tua subscriptione fuerit cassari.

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Dear Editors,

I did not realise that your publication had immersed itself in the fashion industry with Professor Hemingway’s piece on dyer critics. Is this a new direction?

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Dear Oddly,

We are afraid you read his piece entirely wrongly. It was about dire critics, as in those who review articles and books without actually having ever read them. Not that they exist in academia or journalism.

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Dear Sirs,

Self-deprecation is one thing; self-abnegation another. As a dedicated reader of your journal and winner of Miss Who’s Read the Furthest in SpecGram? International competition 1986, I can assure you, contra Downie, that almost all of us have read this far.

I may not have read Jane Eyre’s Moby-Dick or indeed even seen it—but I have read SpecGram. Indeed, as President of the SpecGram ‘We’ve read everything’ unofficial independent fanclub, I can inform you that among the many strategies used by SpecGrammites to ensure that they do indeed read this far, is to, unlike God, not begin at the beginning but at the end of a given article. Many members of the club attest that this in fact gives rise to a greater sense of textual coherence than beginning at line 1. Thus, if Downie wishes to suggest that some of us may not have read this far, he may wish to insert this erroneous caption at the head of his pieces.

That said, everything else is perfect!

Keep up the good work!

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Dear Samuel Beckett,

We stopped reading at ‘D-’.

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This is a formal order to cease and desist using the word “diacritics” which was copyrighted by me decades ago with the publication of my earth-shattering book DIACRITICS. Attorneys for my tax-exempt religious order Sciontautology will be unleashed upon you and yours like you have never seen before. I mean it.

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LoOk, you ṕóíńtý-èàȑèd ḷėȧḟ-ḷịċḳịṇġ ṱřḙě-ȟṷmpḙř! You’re sitting pretty in Rivendell while the rest of us have to ẘȏřƙ for a living... wait, wait, the legal interns are providing some new information... oh, you are fans of the Warrior Princess, Ẍëṅä! That’s different! Wait, wait, the legal interns are providing more new information... w̫a̫it̫... ẘh͚åt͚!? Pųḩ-ļəəɘɘeeʐȥе!

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Dear All,

In your April issue, you stated that when irregular forms become productive, they emit boogie-woogie. In fact, there are few forms of music less redolent of productivity than boogie-woogie, just as there are few journals less productive than Speculative Grammarian.

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Dear Wookie Booger,

Thanks for swinging us this jazzy letter. You may think it romantic, perhaps even that it rocks and rolls; but the classic folk here feel it’s rather baroque and that it has left us feeling blue. So hip-hop off to your garage house and let us carry on with our funky disco.

We’ll play you out!

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Dear Eds,

Having taken myself aside for my monthly five-minute scan through SpecGram, I was taken aback, to see in a recent issue that you now have a ‘resident poet’. Leaving aside the oddness of what is clearly a contrived pseudonym, may I enquire where s/he ‘resides’? Why is this individual not simply employed? As a ‘resident’ poet, one assumes some room has been set aside for this individual; indeed, an entire suite may has been given over to facilitate this residence. If so, readers are entitled to know the costs of this and to what extent these are implicated in the recent 13% rise in cover price.

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Dear Ooh,

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Dear Eds,

I write on behalf of the Autonomous Anti-Autonomous Morphology Association of the Autonomous Americas (AAAMAAA), based out of Autonomy, Oregon, to complain about your recent page of morphology-related rhyming ephemera. Four complaints, each logically autonomous of the other (but not of themselves (respectively)):

#1: It is well known that morphology will ultimately be reduced to either syntax or phonology. Although Wikipedia miscategorises this truth as a controversy, the ongoing work of AAAMAAA constitutes just one small part of the wide-ranging efforts that will finally anti-autonomise morphology for ever. Ra ha ha ha!

#2: The ditties cover a wide range of phenomena, not all of which are necessarily morphological. It is therefore misleading to entitle the item ‘O Morphology!’

#3: #2 notwithstanding, certain ditties duplicate others in theme (in addition to form!). Alongside the irrelevance noted above, we readers must therefore also suffer redundancy, two errors which, being autonomous of each other, double the readerly pain level.

#4: The ditties are of the poorest quality.

With those four, lawless autonomous morphology bores thwarting the force of your journal’s cause, we pause to ask you to automatically withdraw these poor poetic forms forthwith.

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Dear Bonar Law,

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Dear sirs,

The reference to the line ‘Let it be’ in a recent poem in your journal had the unfortunate effect of triggering traumatic memories in both my partner and me originally brought on by forced overexposure to recent similar periphrastic exhortatives such as ‘Let it go’ and ‘Let him live’ (respectively from Disney Frozen and Les Miserables). Given the negative emotional impact engendered by this kind of construction, we would request that a health warning be provided on the cover of any future issue of your journal in which periphrastic exhortatives feature.

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Dear Brian and George,

Leave it out!

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Hey Eds,

Great to see linguistics finally waking up to the sheer beastiness of those Lizard Kings of old. Loved the piece on Dino Critters! Shame they got wiped out by such a grave event as an asteroid hitting earth: it caused them acute problems and wiped them all umlaut.

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Dear Bronto-Brain,

Thanks for that; hang around linguistics long enough and you’ll come across some here-and-now dinosaurs (not to mention theories that should be extinct).

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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.

	Submit!—A Letter from Senior Editor Jonathan Downie
	Scots Wikipedia Exposed As Fake—SpecGram Wire Services
	SpecGram Vol CLXXXVIII, No 3 Contents