The Solution to Poor Pedantry is... More, Better Pedantry—Bück Würm, E. G. Ghed, and Petra Gogue SpecGram Vol CXCV, No 1 Contents Meeting Notes of the Société de Linguistique de Paris (c. 100,000 BCE)—Avery Iger Professor-of-Linguistics-at-the-University-of-Oxford

The Joke’s on Us! Part I
A Review of Alleged Humour in SpecGram

Hugh Merrous, Joe King, and Belle E. Laffgh
Under-Department of Ostensibly Amused Readership

Speculative Grammarian’s Under-Department of Ostensibly Amused Readership was recently put under new section management. After firing over half of the staff and installing an executive spa, we, the new section heads, immediately set about reviewing recent reader feedback on the perennial question of whether SpecGram is funny or not, and if it is, whether it is trying to be. Reader feedback varies both considerably and consistently considerably as the following extracts from the review make clear.

As you can see, the feedback is “nuanced” to say the least. The resulting 1,000 page pixel report engendered a flurry of ice-cream and activity at the Highest Pinnacle of success in SpecGram Towers, with the following policy decision outcome: we need to do something to establish the humorous intentions and effects of SpecGram. The upshot of all this is as follows: in the long tradition of formulaic and predictable one-liners,1 SpecGram commissioned the following set of jokes based on the overly familiar snowclone “An x walks into a bar...”3 We sincerely hope that this tired list of weak puns should serve as a clear indication of whether the journal intends to beand indeed ishumorous or not and thereby settle the issue once and for all.

More to come...



1 Apologies in advance: many are more-than-one-liners and some stray wildly off-topic; certain contributors’ enthusiasm couldn’t be curbed; a greater number of lines does not necessarily correlate with a higher degree of ostensible humour (or lack of); feel free to skip all non-one-liners.2 For your convenience, contributions are sorted roughly by the length of their base-47 encoding into roŋoroŋo. The longest items will appear in Part II.

2 And all one-liners, for that matter.

3 We toyed with the idea of going with the formula4 “There was a lexicographer, a semanticist, and a pragmaticist...” but we couldn’t find the right words, the jokes didn’t really mean anything, and the context wasn’t quite right.

4 A few contributions were not necessarily off-topic, but were off-form, failing to conform to the “An x walks into a bar...” format, and had to be excluded. A sample of praeteritionally representative examples are given here:

The Solution to Poor Pedantry is... More, Better PedantryBück Würm, E. G. Ghed, and Petra Gogue
Meeting Notes of the Société de Linguistique de Paris (c. 100,000 BCE)Avery Iger Professor-of-Linguistics-at-the-University-of-Oxford
SpecGram Vol CXCV, No 1 Contents