Dear Mid-Month Editors,

As a longtime reader of SpecGram, I’ve noted the occasional Mid-Month issue with amusement and—when they provide bonus content—some glee. But I’ve always been curious, what specifically qualifies as “mid-”? Is it the 15th for every month, or the 14th for February? Does January or July get a release on the 15th-and-a-half? How accurate are your mid-month calculations?

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Dear Month Math Nerd,

The precise release date depends on whether it is, for example, a Precisely Mid-July Issue (available exclusively to Diamond tier and above subscribers) or just a Roughly Mid-July Issue (available even to the οἱ πολλοί who read SpecGram for free via computational crutch). When necessary, we have the Release Date Interns calculate, for example, the precise Middle of July; such honors are reserved for content that the editorial board considers significant enough to qualify for the higher price point.

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Dear Editors,

I was perplexed by the recent job advert for individuals to act as phonemes for languages of the world with small phonemic inventories. As my seminal 1972 paper Phoneme Redistribution: The Case for Phonemic Inventory Equality argues, the only feasible solution for languages with small phoneme inventories is to lease phonemes from other larger inventory languages to them. I was personally responsible for smuggling out the voiced palatal stop from Hungarian during the 1952 Uprising which gave new life to Zabord, a language of the Polynesian archipelago, and the organisation I set up in 1964 which continues to this day has redistributed over 350 phonemes around the globe. Please stop peddling this fantastical nonsense about training people to become phonemes.

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Dear Uvular,

As committed capitalists, we cannot condone the redistribution of phonemes but prefer to rely on the enlightened philanthropy of the private sector. However, we’d love to discuss licensing a T-shirt design with you; proposed legend: “I got the [ɟ] out of Ma[ɟ]arország”.

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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.

	Here We Go Again —or, This Too Shall Pass—A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief
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