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How Do I Love Thee?, Let Me Draw a Tree Diagram. Alex Savoy. [Author’s Note: Quite in fitting with the approach of Valentine’s Day, I submit this love poem, which, surprisingly, actually worked—though alas I am no longer dating said person anymore, which is why I am bitterly prostituting this former declaration of love, which I have suitably altered for the occasion.] How do I love thee? Let me draw a tree diagram— I was maundering, lonely as a bilabial trill, When I first heard your voice—(some breathy strange tongue), I was love-struck at once—(after all, I was young), How rounded your mouth, And iotally perfect your skin. Your eyes are like geminates, plosive and clear, ... [ more ] 
Draw Me a Linguist. Aster E. O’Gnosis and Margo Llicso. Much has been made recently in certain circles of the stereotypical views children have of scientists, and how those views are changed after paying a visit to CERN—all reflected in the drawings of the children. (Drollette, 2010) The cliché says that children are our future, and the humanizing effect of the CERN visit on children’s perceptions may eventually be parlayed into an increase in the number of young people who choose to pursue science as a profession, which of course results in better enrollment in college courses, and thus more funding for science departments. We figured linguistics could probably use some of that action, too. ... [ more ]
SpecGram Archives. A word from our Senior Archivist, Holger Delbrück: While bringing aging media to the web and hence the world is truly a labor of love, SpecGram tries the passion of even the most ardent admirer. Needless to say, we’ve fallen behind schedule. At every turn, the authors found in the pages of this hallowed journal stretch credibility with their gratuitous font mongering—first it was the IPA, then a few non-standard transcription systems, then Greek, and not just the alphabet, but the entire diacritical mess, and now I’ve got some god-forsaken Old Church Slavonic glyph sitting on my desk that no one can even name, and which would give the Unicode Consortium ... [ more ]
Linguimericks, Book ७२. When first I encountered x-bar— In a pub, on my fourth or fifth jar— I thought ‘This won’t last long’ Wrong! But that pub’s long gone: X-bar lasts, but that pub’s an ex-bar —William Deaksworth, Glancingly, lit’rally, The phrase “double dactyl” Two-headed pterosaurs, Maybe evokes. A polycephalous Quetzalcoatlus, Or metrical structure, Suited for jokes? —Emily Davis, To My American Colleagues Your day may have just now begun Mine, here, is halfway through its run; But amongst other capers I’ve written five papers ’N’ taught syntax to post-docs for fun —U. Rhopian, Understanding our linguistic ... [ more ]
The Chaos†. Gerard Nolst Trenité. Dearest creature in creation Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse. I will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear; Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer. Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! Just compare heart, hear and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word. Sword and sward, retain and Britain (Mind the latter how it’s ... [ more ]
IPAlindromes II—Find the IPAlindrome!. Mary Shapiro, Truman State University. In the last installment, I introduced the idea of the IPAlindrome (based on phonemic and/or phonetic transcription rather than written English). This time, it’s up to you to uncover the IPAlindrome, based on the given paraphrases. The IPAlindromes here are all phonemic, ignoring allophonic variation introduced by aspiration, nasalization, etc. As last time, diphthongs are treated as single units. E.g. (A pithy observation, not a full sentence.) When the mind is not sharp, using a trademarked chemical product to remove body hair leads to exsanguination. → Dull brain, Nair, blood. Below are five more for you to figure ... [ more ]
Trapezity: a modest proposal for a new typological category. by Nathan W. Hill. “that temple wherein earnest young people are taught not the language itself, but the method of teaching others to teach that method” (V. Nabokov, Pnin, p. 3) A success of the functionalist approach to linguistics is to increasingly uncover grammatical categories. To ‘tense’ and ‘mood’ of the ancients accrued ‘aspect’ (Comrie 1976), ‘evidentiality’ (Aikhenvald 2004), ‘mirativity’ (DeLancey 1997), ‘impulsative’ (Cathcart 2011), ‘state’ (Mettouchi and Frajzyngier 2013), ‘speaker expectation of interlocutor knowledge’ (Hyslop 2014), ... [ more ]
NEW RELEASE iGrammoid Apps for Linguists and Linguistoids. For rookie linguists ... The Applet Lets you have user-friendly, quick-look, to-the-point, state-of-the-art, no-nonsense, one-size-fits-all access to short definitions of core linguistic terms, schools of thought and thinkers (with optional on/off profanity function, in the latter case). Fully cross-referenced. ... The Appall Shock-historical/hysterical introduction to the whole field of linguistics, from sound through meaning to fury and beyond, from innocent musings to deliberate full-blown speculations, from linguistic facts to theoretical fiction (in that order), from ... [ more ]
Describe This!. A letter from the Managing Editor. Perhaps the stress of managing and publishing SpecGram has finally gotten to me, or maybe I've just seen too many poorly written manuscripts describing half-baked ideas lately.1 Whatever the cause, I have, of late, felt a strangely compelling need to abandon my Descriptivist Idealism in favor of Prescriptivist Tyranny. I've never been a big fan of rules that derive their legitimacy from the notion that "That's how it has always been."2 And as far as I'm concerned, erudite appeals to etymologically correct grammatical etiquette fall into that category. So, in no uncertain terms, let me say that graffiti and data are mass nouns in ... [ more ]
The Never-Ending Story of Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know, (because they aren’t actually true), gathered at great personal risk of, psycholinguistic harm from actual student papers, by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira This 16th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them. Articulatory labels and descriptions. [æ] is a monothong. [æ] is a voiced front sornanant, low. In [æ], the vibration of the audible friction is lax. [ɒ] occurs at the lower part of ... [ more ]
The Phonetic Clarity Defect in the Drinker’s Speech, The language of cocktails and shooters. By Dr. I.R. Superordinate, Chair of Recently Recovered Research, Department of Futile Linguistics, University of Jealleybeane, Hluhluwe, Republic of South Africa. Research into the field of phonetic clarity has been scant in the history of Linguistics, the infamous linguists1 who practice in this field usually having their field notes (handwritten on various napkins, pieces of paper, etc.) destroyed by housekeepers, university cleaning staff, jealous academics and, of course, bartenders.2 It is therefore my privilege to bring my own research in this field to life in this paper. It has been noticed that the ... [ more ]
What Can Visualizations enGender?, Decreasing Man’s Power While Increasing Grammatical Accuracy. Megan Smith and Le Anne Lucia Spino1, Michigan State University. Previous research in the feminist theory paradigm (Phemme, 2014) has found an effect for visualization exercises and decreased susceptibility to patriarchal modes of thinking in women. In other words, participants who spent five minutes a day visualizing themselves free of patriarchal modes of thinking experienced more liberation from repressive thought patterns than participants who did no visualization. Phatale (1645) found similar effects for visualization and more target-like performance in learners’ production of resultative ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian Youth Research Focus is proud to bring you the finest language-related research by the world’s school-aged youth. Teaching Linguistics in High School. Sven Slater and Ollie Bickford, J.R. Nelson, Jr. High School, St. Cloud, Minnesota, USA. Introduction. We were required to do an experiment for this year’s High School Science Fair. Our teacher didn’t seem to have any good suggestions for topics, so we called up our old 5th Grade teacher Mr. Olson and asked him if he had any suggestions. He said that linguists have been trying to develop a curriculum for teaching Linguistics in High Schools, and that they probably would appreciate having some ... [ more ]
HashiWordakero. by Lacuna Mamihlapinatapai, l’École de SpecGram, Tierra del Fuego. This puzzle is worth 7 points. HashiWordakero is just another in the endless albeit exhilarating series of Quasi-Nihonese puzzles made with the aid of the notoriously freakish Puzzle Elves. This diversion is a variant of the traditional Japanese puzzle Hashiwokakero (also known as “bridges”), and the rules are quite untroubling: swap the letters on all the islands with the number of words (words are delimited with spaces or dashes) in which that letter occurs in these instructions. Then link the islands with bridges that run either east to west or north to south, so that every island has the right quantity of ... [ more ]
Linguistics Nerd Camp. Bethany Carlson. Warren tries to sell his controversial new “Pyramid Model” to his professor. ... [ more ]
The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics Errata. You can tell which version of The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics you have, and thus gauge how many charming lapses in editorial oversight it contains, by checking the copyright page near the front of the book. We also “appreciate” your reports of errata—though half the time reported “errors” are actually a failure to get a particularly obscure or abstruse joke. To report an error, seek out the “Email Us” link, and click on through. It is Well Known Among Linguists... Every book has at least one error in it, and at least one unneccesary word. Thus, by induction, every book ... [ more ]
Letters to the Editor. Dear Eds, In the Letters to the Editor of your last issue, you took a letter writer to task for a fairly mild opinion about the use of lay instead of lie in a limerick, accusing your correspondent of base prescriptivism. Yet in the same collection of limericks, “Sir” Krotchet E. Auld-Boomah rails agains the loss of the mass/count distinction among millennials. Hypocrisy much? Aidu d’Clair ... Dear Ms. de Lune, Get off our lawn! —Eds. ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ Dear Sirs, In one of your latest screeds, you write, “Several members of the SpecGram editorial and poetical staff feel like they can rightfully levy charges of baseless ... [ more ]
Meet the SpecGram Editors. In response to a decades-long demand to lift the veil of near-anonymity behind which the editors of Speculative Grammarian live, lurk, and work, we have begrudgingly agreed to provide publicly for the very first time a series of brief biographical sketches of select editors. Those editors with multiple outstanding federal warrants for their arrest on charges of morphotonemic mayhem, negligent homonymicide, and suffixual assault have been excluded, upon advice from our attorneys. Two more biographical sketches are below — ... Name: William Nangishlishma Spruiell, Title: Consulting Editor, Birthdate: 12 Fleeing Weasel 15 Noise, Areas of Research: ... [ more ]
Re: Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics. A Letter to the Editor. The Editor, SpecGaram1 Sir,2 Readers should note that the article—Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics in SpecGram CL.α—despite appearances—is not a game, or a mere interactive text adventure! It is a highly sophisticated applied expert system, diligent use of which will enable the user to simulate the actualities at very little personal cost but time. Yet experiencing all of its tracks—albeit virtually rather than in actuality, be it said—will provide the participant with a wonderful, exhilarating experience that may ... [ more ]
New Year, New You. A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. Greetings Gentle Reader, and welcome to a new decade of SpecGram. What a decade the last one was! Nearly 1,300 articles—written by hundreds of contributors—were published in more than 125 issues of Speculative Grammarian. All but the earliest handful of almost 300 episodes of the SpecGram Podcast (requiescat in pace)—including 50 episodes of Language Made Difficult—were painstakingly podded and then cast into the æther. We publicly celebrated our Tenth Digiversary in 2014, and privately celebrated our 15th last year: we had a quiet evening with a close circle ... [ more ]
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Last updated Sep. 22, 2026.