A Plea for Shortnesse The good Gramarien Speculatiue Oft bendeth not him to belieue Thet he amuseth diuelish longe; Hys pages runnen to a thronge. When the most thet he wolde sayn Were in a dosen wordes pleyn He foot notes addeth to hys warre And gildeth lelys, wher no lelys are. Better far he might clock hys limit— Put, as ye now saye, a sock in it. Robert of Norwich —— Dear Bob, Your poem is beautiful; an elegant dagger through our collective heart. —Eds. ********** Dear Editors, Recently a colleague asked me about interlinear glossing conventions for words that are interrupted by infixes. In the language in question (a Qiangic one, Namuyi, to be precise), singers insert vocables (meaningless syllables) into the middle of words. The words are multisyllabic, and at least in some cases, the independent syllables don’t mean anything. If we did this as with English infixation examples I’ve seen, it would be something like fan-freakin’-tastic and we’d need to gloss something analogous to English fantastic. Unfortunately in Namuyi neither fan nor tastic actually mean anything. Together they mean “fantastic”. Does anyone at SpecGram have any experience with glossing in such a situation? Thanks, Xifan Ilunga —— Dear Mr. X., But the thing is, in this case fan and tastic originally did have independent meanings. You see, the term came about in the 1870s in association with a new device imported from France that used a mechanical fan to dry appliques to ceramic cups: fan-tasse-stick. It was quite a fad for about three years, and while the device has been utterly forgotten, its name lives on. The more anglicized form, fancupstic, never caught on outside of a few rural varieties in the Appalachians. Hope that helps. —Eds. ********** [We received the very interesting quartet of letters, reproduced below, over the last month. We believe no further commentary is really necessary. —Eds.] —— Dear Editors, We three have put aside our differences long enough to collectively condemn the work of Küçük Kaynaranyak Küçük. While her data was interesting, her conclusions were unsupported (and unsupportable!). We hope that the debate continues, but believe you should consider renouncing her previously published article. Sincerely, Michael Palin Eve M.Adam Hippolytus Drome —— To the editors of Speculative Grammarian, Though we have disagreed in print concerning the details of center embedded passives, we feel that we must stop our debate long enough to strongly request that you retract the recently published center embedding article by Michael Palin. His illustration skills are fabulous, but the rest of his article is just poor scholarship. Best Regards, Hippolytus Drome Küçük Kaynaranyak Küçük Eve M.Adam —— Dear SpecGram, We are writing to you about a recent article concerning center embedding by Eve M.Adam which you published, nearly destroying the integrity of your once esteemed journal. You should reject, renounce, retract, and revert it, before your journal loses any more esteem. Cheers, Hippolytus Drome Küçük Kaynaranyak Küçük Michael Palin —— To Whom It May Concern, As concerned researchers in the field of Center Embedding, we must strongly object to your publication of a recent article, purportedly on that topic, by an academic miscreant by the name of Hippolytus Drome. What crap! Don’t let it happen again! Thank you, Eve M.Adam Michael Palin Küçük Kaynaranyak Küçük **********

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.

	SpecGram and the World—Letters from the International Advisory Council of Speculative Grammarian
	The complications posed to the comprehension and utterance of the English language with the advent of the influence and infiltration of the invading non-adjective and non-adverbial alien invaders in simple sentences: a look at English speech post-millennium-bug.—I.R. Superordinate
	SpecGram Vol CLV, No 1 Contents