The SpecGram Linguistic Advice Collective

Are you in a world of linguistic hurt? The SpecGram Linguistic Advice Collective (SLAC) will offer you empirical, empathic, emphatic advice you can use!^*

Remember, if you can tell the difference between good advice and bad advice, then you don’t need advice! So, if you need advice, trust us—and cut yourself some SLAC!

Dear SLAC,

While we have had another live infant since shortly after 1 a.m. this year, she has not yet written her first academic paper. Should I be concerned about the development of her linguistics career?

—Dr. Jarnathan McNounie

Dear Jarn-Jarn,

Noah McMosky will be so disappointed.

—SLAC Unit #50657465

Dear Jarnny,

Has she mastered Internal MERGE yet? If not, it’s your own slacker fault she hasn’t. Poverty of the stimulus, Dad, poverty of the stimulus!!!

—SLAC Unit #4d696b61656c

[In the spirit of trying new things, we have allowed our letter writer to join the SLAC conversation. —Eds]

Dear SLACkers,

She has mastered producing waste matter and complaining loudly. I believe that makes her a philosophy prof.

—Jarnathan

Dear Eòirn,

It will be about two more years before she writes her first paper on child language acquisition. The submitted manuscript will be the most readable thing she ever writes. But don’t worry: by the time the editors manage to go through their list of potential reviewers one by one (figuring three messages each until they say that they’re unavailable because their parrot is sick or they can’t be near non-hypoallergenic data or they’re going on a six-month vacation with their friends through the Himalayas and the wifi is really spotty) and find someone whom they can strong-arm into reviewing it (and end up haranguing for another six months because it turns out that even though the wifi is actually pretty good it’s the hypoxia that gets you), she’ll have acquired enough inkhorn vocabulary to bring the revised manuscript up to the standards of one of the lesser linguistics journals.

—SLAC Unit #56696e63656e74

McNounie, J. et al. “Ensuring Statistical Significance in First Language Acquisition Studies”.

—SLAC Unit #50657465

For the social sciences, his sample size of four is already unreasonably large.

—SLAC Unit #4b65697468

Both male and female in the sample too!

—Jarnathan

Dear Dr. McNounie,

I suggest you enroll your entire brood in Speculative Grammarian Scotland Cooperative Extension’s Wee Early Academic Nurturance™ program, which—for a nominal upfront fee and small percentage of all future earnings—will train your progeny from birth in the ways of academic bureaucracy and power. W.E.A.N. offers several Late Start Programs for neglected offspring who have not been enrolled by the age of 5, and Desperate Last Chance Programs for your unloved spawn who have not been enrolled by the age of 10. After that, the Academic Critical Period ends, and your lineage is doomed, ivory-towerly speaking. (You and your scions will have to settle for careers among the astronauts, CEOs, surgeons, nuclear engineers, architects, pharmacists, and other riffraff of society.)

—SLAC Unit #54726579

	Plumbing the Orthographic Depths—Djacq-Jhacq Kū-Stowe
	Linguistics’ Most Common Initialism: A Celebration of PLP—Penelope, Lysander, and Patricia
	SpecGram Vol CXCIV, No 4 Contents