Tea Encompasses All

by A Large Majority of the SpecGram Editorial Board

Sometimes our mail is just a bit overwhelming. A case in point is the recent deluge that flooded our offices in response to an (apparently) ill-phrased editorial response to an even more ill-phrased letter we had received.

Natalia Levshina, Dirk Geeraerts, and Dirk Speelman, 2014, “Dutch causative constructions: Quantification of meaning and meaning of quantification”, in Corpus Methods for Semantics: Quantitative studies in polysemy and synonymy, John Benjamins. Chiasmus of the Month June 2015

As the original letter was submitted by that hectoring pain-in-our-side, Punctilio P. Punctate, we should have held our tongues to begin with, and this entire issue of SpecGram would have been averted. But we unwisely printed PPP’s sadly misguided letter, and now that we’ve made that bed, you’re having to sleep in it.

Dozens of letters flooded our office in response to our punchy response to paunchy Punctilio. Only one of these met our current editorial standards and is presented for your consideration (and derision) in this issue.

Alongside this chatter, though, we also received a bumper harvest of real scholarship. Our more devout readers will recall that, entirely tangential to the point being made, our response to Punctie made reference to “that ghastly tea” [sic]. We would not have predicted it, but tea turns out to be a favorite topic among linguists, and we are therefore pleased to submit to you the finest of the submissions that were submitted to us on the subject of tea, subsequent to our having broached the subject.

And so, we leave you to a delicious repast, knowing that when you’ve finished imbibing this issue, you will be steeped in the subject, enjoying the sweetness of the cream of our submissions on the subject of The Linguistics of Tea.

	Letters to the Editor
	SpecGram Vol CLXXIII, No 2 Contents