Dear Eds,

As a speaker of Naissru, I feel very sorry for those poor struggling Silghen speakers. A life without future tense must be such an awful fate! Their plight makes me feel downright blue—or, at least, light blue. I reckon those poor Silghen sods don’t even know what light blue feels like. So sad.

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Dear Little Boy Blue,

Don’t feel too bad for the Silghen speakers. Their orthography is significantly worse than any other feature of their language; in fact, they arguably have no spelling rules, only rough guidelines. Silghen is pronounced /sæksən/, for example. As a result of having to learn to spell every word individually, Silghen speakers tend to have better than average memories.

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I am writing to you to ask for clarification on footnote 3 of your recent editorial on the High Point of Linguistics. I was originally hopeful when I saw the title of the editorial, and then delighted when I felt that you recognized my pain, specifically in these words: “some tall people bang their heads on low beams”—yes, yes we do. But then footnote 3, like a metaphorical snake in the grass—a very low metaphorical snake in the grass—bit me in the metaphorical ankle. The footnote is disturbingly ambiguous to me. Are you saying that your readership is or is not particularly tall? This is very important to me.

You see, I became a disciple of St. Randy of Newman at a young age, after receiving the holy gift of his divine musical revelation in 1977; I have been trying to live my life according to his melodic gospel ever since. As a freshman at Rice University in the early ’90s, I stumbled upon Speculative Grammarian and—after stalking discovering that the then Managing Editor was easily more than a standard deviation above average height—I devoted my academic career to linguistics, and I have been an ardent fan and faithful reader of your journal ever since. When I discovered in the early ’00s that the new Managing Editor of a relaunched SpecGram was easily two standard deviations above average height, I was ecstatic, and took it as a sign... a great, lanky, beanstalk of a sign!

I moved to the Netherlands to be among my people (vertically speaking). I learned Dutch and Limburgish. I joined the local chapter of the Γραμματο-Χαοτικον and set about a multi-decade project—which I am 15 years into!—to shift the pitch accent of Limburgish to use only high tones. In all languages that I speak, I have a statistically marked preference for words with high vowels, and all of my vowels are markedly raised. As a side project, I am also attempting to introduce my three favorite vowels as distinct phonemes into English, Dutch, Limburgish, and Adyghe. May I introduce you to /i̝/, /u̝̝/, and /y̝̝̝/?

Have you betrayed me—e̝t tū̝, SpecGram?

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Dear Paul Bunyan,

What a tall tale! You ΓΧ taypes air a hoot, boot of coorse we ken’t trost ainything you say!

SpecGram has never discriminated by height in any field of endeavor—and, boy, howdy, does our rec league basketball team suck! We like to think that our readers, contributors, and editors think high, lofty thoughts a bit more often than the average linguist or other academician, but that’s the extent of it.

The statistical interns suggest that the height of our recent Managing Editors is a fluke—in the scientific sense of the word—and, citing “regression to the mean” (whatever that is), are giving 95⅓-to-47⅙ odds that the next Managing Editor will be shorter than either of the last two.

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Dear “Editors”,

This is an official Stage One warning. Our inspection team has detected that one of your alleged “editors” may have been granted prizes for participation in contests which your “publication” conducted. [REF: PREVIOUS PUZZLE SOLUTIONS]. Although deeper investigation of your “journal” leads us to suspect that none of the purported “editors” are in fact real individuals, we nonetheless hereby inform you that under in both our European and our North American jurisdictions (in both of which your so-called “scholarship” is freely accessible and therefore fully prosecutable) it is a violation of both the spirit and the letter of the Puzzlers’ Code to name the puzzle-issuing publication’s own staff as “winners”, much less to actually award prizes to such individuals.

Under our Terms of Incorporation, our agency is authorized to issue a Stage One warning before taking formal action against perpetrators of Puzzling Misdemeanors or Puzzling Crimes. You are hereby notified that this Stage One warning will be followed by a full investigation. In the course of such investigations, we have never uncovered an innocent party, so you should prepare yourselves for prosecution. Once we complete our current full investigation of the so-called “Will Shortz” (which we anticipate should take no more than 13 years), we will take up your case with full vigor.

In the meantime, we advise you to avoid the possibility of further violations by bringing your Puzzling Activities up to internationally respected standards.

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Dear Putzling Commies,

• Better organizations than yours have said worse things about us. We are unfazed and unflapped.
• Under international maritime law, SpecGram technically has no “staff”. Interns and indentured servants as far as the eye can see.
• Zero editors, readers, contributors, or puzzlers were harmed—physically, mentally, or fiduciarily—by those awards. Some interns may have been flogged, but who cares?
• Zealously frothing at the mouth while tilting at windmills is not a good look on anyone. Just sayin’.
• Our lawyers (still not staff) are better than your lawyers. Feel free to test that—we have a spot saved on our trophy wall for your heads.^*
• For all you know, those winners are just people who happen to have the same name as our editors, or they could be pseudonyms. Or both.
• Finally, there is a secret message hidden in this list. Can you find it?

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Dear Eds,

Thank you for your recent editorial asking the readership “what’s the hype on’t in linguistics?” I wasn’t sure why the Shakespearean cliticised it was in play but assumed it was something both esoteric and funny that was beyond me. Anyway, I’ve been an academic in linguistics for over a quarter of century and still don’t see what the hype on’t is all about. I’d be grateful for a summary of the answers you received; I’ve got years to go before retirement and anything remotely motivational might just allow me to blather on about syntax on Monday morning.

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Dear Hypoallergenic,

Thanks for bringing’t up; we’re on’t and will be revisiting this important topic and the responses we received to’t as soon as’t’s possible.

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To the Editors:

There you go again. I think I’m safe reading some baloney about rationalizing the Roman numeral system when I realize to my horror that I’ve swallowed the pill of an X-bar, followed by a C-bar and a V-bar. Speculative Grammarian has a dubious reputation for its argumentative philosophy that “bits are cheaper than ink by the barrel if you have the right data plan”, but only slightly less well-known is your motto to “never fail to transform a generation into generativists!” Stop cheerleading for Chomsky and do something more functional and constructive!

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Dear Rolaids,

It will surely be a relief for you to know that we discontinued our semi-annual pilgrimage to the Center of the Universe™ (the other Cambridge, sorry not sorry) a few years ago after The Incident™. There we all were, in a shaky but passable human-pyramid formation, chanting “2, 4, 6, 8, Who do we appreciate? Chomsky! Chomsky! Noooooooooam Chomsky!” when from an upper floor of the Stata Center we heard someone shout, “It’s whom, you idiots!” Since then, we only go annually, and we write new chants that won’t be mocked for their grammar. Talk about functional and constructive!

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Dear Eds,

Regarding your recent editorial “What’s the Point of Linguistics?” I took some trouble to provide a detailed answer to the question posed but have yet to receive any notification or response.

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Dear Dies Irae,

We read the first two responses which came in, both of which reached a new low point. So we stopped.

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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.

	Spring’s Springiness Springs Springingly: Putting a SpecGrammy Spring in Your Linguistic Step This Spring—Spree Ng and B. D. Oing
	/nuz baɪts/
	SpecGram Vol CXCII, No 2 Contents