Assessing the Impact of Speculative Grammarian on the Reconstitution of Nonparametric Satirical Meta-Theory

Trent Slater
The Δίς Λεγόμενον Centre for Endeepened Ideation

Time works via obdurate obstinacy, reworking the not-yet to the now and the now to the was, elongating the path from the would-have-been-if-only-I-remembered-my-turkey-sandwich to the oops-I-dropped-my-pizza. By this, we understand that time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana. Thus, sadly, we find ourselves pronouncing funerary odes and laments over the corpus of a journal whose finery adorned the greatest minds and whose Herculean feats ascended the Mount Olympus of satirical linguistics.

But what hath been is the servant of the what shall be. Odes delight the muses but bibliometrics delight the administrators. What light hath this August (and sometimes February) publication shed on the hinterland of the urheimat? How shall we appreciate its pale glow?

Far be it from mortals to measure the impact of the deepest penetration of wit. Would an accountant dare to audit the witterary wealth of the jester? Shall the comedian bow to the mathematician?

Nay! For the measure of the worth of a wordsmith is not in the smithing but in the wording, not in the verbosity but in the pomposity.

Impactus relativus est.

Meta-theory wert unbowed before thine coming. The schools of Labov and Chomsky played with grammar, fire, and dangerous things with no limits to their ludic jaunts.

To discourse on thine coherence is Nida here nor there. It is not Gutt, neither is it of relevance. It is as if I gavagai some rabbit parts and they were cooked in a PIE on a ship suffering from a Swadesh list to one side.

At some point between the realia and the irrealis, the twists and turns of outrageous theory were mastered by a merry band of worders, weird in their outlook and gallant like thunderbirds. Twixt snickers and sibilants, over voiceless velar, nasal ingressive trills, it were no picnic to hide puns by the pound and jabs by the bucket-full.

Yet what has befallen our good ship? Have her morphological rules been breached? Has she failed to pay the syntax or been deafened by a competent speaker? Alas, all good linguistic publications must eventually phonome and even the rashest of plosives slide towards becoming ejective. Historical linguistics must linear be and the Voynich must eventually be scratched.

Time, tide, and funding wait for no linguist and even the greatest language will someday die, falling from crowded rooms to empty Plato’s caves, from language acquisition to language reconstruction, to lonely scrawls on whiteboard walls.

	Increasing Linguistic Self-Referentiality in Weird Ways—Γραμματο-Χαοτικον
	Metrical Dimorphism: An Onomastic Noun-Verb Hypothesis—G.R.R. L’Power & Lexi Kahn
	SpecGram Vol CXCV, No 3 Contents