To the editors of Speculative Grammarian,

One imagines you would rather simply be “Speculative Grammarians” or some such nonsense.

I observed recently in your Mad Libitum “Stylometry” that you had a text receptacle which bore the instruction “Fill in the box below with a language.” I was quite aghast at this request, for it supposes that an entire language can have a textual representation (one supposes even a canonical representation), which you must surely realize is impossible, given the current state of the field. Furthermore, such a small box is surely far too small to have such a representation entered into it.

Then, on further consideration, I realized a yet more horrifying possibility: That you, the editors of so august a publication, could have stooped so low as to allow the desire for brevity to lead you to “a language” when in fact you meant “the standard educated-North-American-Anglophone exonym of a language”, which, while still more underspecified than I would like, will at least allow a competent Mad Libitum user to type something, unlike your current abomination of a category confusion.

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Dear Annie Oakley,

It seems you’ve missed the mark! More precisely, obviously “the standard educated-European-Anglophone exonym of a language”, “the standard semi-literate-North-American-Anglophone exonym of a language”, and several other variants would serve one’s Mad Libitum–related purposes equally well.

More generally, you are also aiming at the wrong target. In the vernacular of the excessively educated classicists one occasionally finds hanging around near the far borders of Linguistics Land, μετωνυμία of the totum pro parte variety is totally (and wholly, and partly) a thing. Look it up!

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Dear Eds,

We were reading a SpecGram article to our three bunny rabbits yesterday, Flopsy, Mopsy and Neo-Platonist, when suddenly they all keeled over and died. Boredom perhaps? Anyway, we now have lots of spare lettuce. Would you like some?

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Dear Barren of Any Ideas,

Lettuce decline.

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Dear sirs,

Regarding your tagline in the last issue, we few of your better sort of readers have long suspected all you lot were uncultured Yanks of the ghastly r-ful/awful variety. Now you have confirmed it.

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Dear Toss-pots Posh Pops,

Some of us also put the [ˌsuʷpəˈsɪliʲəs] in [ˌsuʷpəˈsɪliʲəst]. However, we prefer not to mock speech impediments when it’s not funny.

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Dear Editors,

Just to say a brief thanks to all the editors as SpecGram for your sterling work over the years. Although on occasion, one might quibble with the odd element of incoherence, purposelessness, unclarity and poor spelling, these minor slips occur, at most only most of the time and, mostly, in no more than most issues. Other than that, SpecGram consistently meets its stated aim as a beacon of adequacy in satirical linguistics, with just about well enough edited articles, letters, features, analysis, and commentary. You are editors without parallel, editors beyond compare, and despite the odd spelling mistake creeping through, editors to the letter. Congrats!

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Dear Alphabet Soup,

Thanks. Here’s some letters. They may spell out a simple two-word message:

T E G     S O L T

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Dear Eds,

On behalf of the British English Pragmalinguistic Exponent Slang SpecGram Fanclub, I’d just like to say a special “Ta!” to Eddy, Editor of Slangy Affairs at SpecGram for many years. The coverage of British English Pragmalinguistic Exponent Slang has been second to none over recent years and we speak for all Fanclub members when we say not only “Cheers”, not merely “Nice one”, but a warm-hearted and full-throated “Ta” to Eddie.

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Dear BDSM,

Sadly, Eddy’s slangy obsession caught up with him in that his work emails sunk to such a level of informality that he was recently sacked (or “booted out” as he preferred to put it). He has since taken up residency in a sleeping bag under the railway bridge where he can often be heard saying “Spare us a coin, guv” in that inimitable slangy way of his.

As and when one of the editorial team is passing him on a cold winter’s night, we will endeavour to pass on your “Ta” as we drop a few meagre coppers in his rusting soup-can of a begging bowl.

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Dear Eds,

While studying linguistics at the University of Merry-Go-Round in the mid-’80s, I was enamoured of a young lady named Edita. We lost touch at graduation but I know that she went on to achieve a doctorate in satirical linguistics. I’m therefore assuming that she reads your publication, and would ask you to publish this letter in the hope that she may remember me and, perhaps, consider returning my affections.

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Dear Hopeless,

As chance would have it, we do know the Edita of whom you speak: she is very happily married to SpecGram’s multi-millionaire lawyer and lives a life of luxury and legal linguistics in a sprawling apartment complex in SpecGram Towers, overlooking the sea.

Alas she doesn’t recall you, but suggests that you consider the affordances of internet dating.

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Dear Eds,

Do you know the game where you change one word into another stepwise by shifting one letter at a time, the restriction being that at each stage, a word must be formed? The famous prototype is of course CAT → DOG which can proceed thus: CAT » COT » DOT » DOG. Well, I’ve been puzzling over this one: LETTER → EDITOR. I’ve got as far as LETTER » BETTER (or possibly SETTER) but after that I’m stuck. Can you help?

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Dear Lunatic,

Do we know “the game”? Do we know “the game”! Good sir, we will have you know that SpecGram so thoroughly dominated “the game” in the spring and summer of 2008—featuring orthographic transforms, phonetic transform, variable-length transforms, etymological transforms, language-familial transforms, bilingual transforms, and palindromic transforms—that the market for “the game” has still not recovered almost two decades later!

Dare not speak to us of “the game”, sirrah!

This is for you: SAD » MAD » MAN.

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Mesdames et Messieurs,

In a preceding “Worst of the Verse” section—a.k.a. Linguimericks, Etc.—Book ५२—one of you lot unintentionally hit upon a significant point that, natch, you were collectively too obtuse to notice: “A dactyl’s just a digit, see.” The whole vocabulary is a stinking mess, really. Is a digit just a finger, is it a finger or a toe? And similarly for a dactyl. This is dumb, and at least English has the sense to distinguish them, but then it goes braindead and uses “digit”, of which there can be either 10 or 20, just for 10 numerals. Clearly what is needed to improve the logical character of English is to make sure that “digit” for pointy or lumpy things sometimes missing from the limbs refers just to the fingers; then for the collective sense of fingers and toes, since there are 20 of them, thereby laying the basis for a vigesimal counting system, clearly the collective term “vigit” is perfectly suited to this use.

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Dear Wackyl Dactyls,

Thank you for your digit-al correspondence. Your proposed terminological upgrade is not without its challenges. While “vigit” admirably toes the line of etymological precision, we fear it may stumble over practical adoption. After all, English is a language where a “foot” can measure 12 inches, a “yard” can stretch to three feet, and a “thumb” needn’t lift a finger.

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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.

	The /bɪɡɪnɪŋ/ of the /ɛnd/—A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief
	Linguimericks—Book १०१
	SpecGram Vol CXCIV, No 3 Contents