Letters to
the Editor
Dear Non-Entities,
While I appreciate your stuff is created ex nihilo, even an empty-headed, knowledgeless bagatelle of a linguist would notice that there’s a vacuum in your morphology poems (no-phology, more like!) with respect to the critical phenomenon of the empty-morph. Often confounded with the zero morph, from which it is clearly a very distinct type of nothing (much as a childless marriage/relationship and a marriage/relationship producing many unloved children are clearly not the same), neither your original poem nor its follow-up attempts to do anything to address this lacuna.
I, of course, don’t give a damn; your vacuous publication is of zero interest to me. However, the black hole left by the omission of this consideration renders both poems null and void—and indeed your entire, sorry enterprise! I expect you’ll do damn all in response to this of course and any redressive action you may take will have zilch value. So back to the abyss with the lot of you!
M. P. T. Knott, A. Dicky-Bird
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Dear Blank,
We have literally nothing to say.
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Dear Eds,
Your contributor the so-called Tale Teller of Tollerton Town lays subtextual claim to comprehensiveness in his whimsical idiocy about ⟨h⟩. Alas not! Let’s have a paragraph for ‘Aaaaargh’, ‘Tch!’ and ‘Ha ha ha ha!’.
Sincerely,
Pierre R. Linguistic-Sound
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Dear Pierot,
Sighhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
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Dear Editors,
Copular “be” ought to read his own poem more carefully! An idle moment’s thought shows that if copular “be” can choose (vis-à-vis its entity) to be or not to be, that makes it half a “be”. Half a “be” philosophically must, ipso facto, be just “b”, making “be” a B-lister among verbs. Indeed, its irregular forms are a blister on English’s beautifully simple conjugation patterns, an ancient injury to modern-day English learners.
Scooter (“Scoo”) Be Doo B. Dewey
Programming Instructor, Montgomery Python Institute
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Dear Doo Doo,
Like the ⟨b⟩ in subtle, please do be (not half) silent.
P.S. Speaking of “irregular forms”, please never again include a photo of yourself with your correspondence.
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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.
