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SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CXCV, Number 3; February 2026, C HIEF C AT H ERDER &, A RBITER OF THE L AST W ORD, Trey Jones, O RDER OF THE, S PECULATIVE P SAMMETICOI, Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson, Tim Pulju, Bill Spruiell, Speculative Grammarian, Vol CXCV, No 3, H EAD OF L EARNING, L INGUISTICS T HROUGH, S ATIRE AND P UNS, Jonathan Downie, S YNTACTICO- P OET &, U NDER- E DITOR OF, U NDER- E DITING, Deak Kirkham, S ENIOR P UZZLING, T EST P ILOT, Vincent Fish, K EEPER OF THE, E DITORIAL T EA C ADDY, Pete Bleackley, A SSOCIATE D EPUTY, A SSISTANT S UB- M ANAGER, OF S ATIRICAL S UCCESS, Luca Dinu, O RTHOGRAPHER- A T- L ARGE, Daniel Swanson, D ILETTANTE E MERITUS, Tel ... [ 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 ]
Speculative Grammarian Merchandise. Introduction. In order to lend a hand to our good friends and steadfast supporters over at the Linguist List during their 2006 fund drive, we prepared a small selection of limited edition SpecGram merchandise, including T-shirts, stickers and magnets. Originally these items were only available as prizes awarded as part of the Linguist List fund drive. In 2012, several of the SpecGram editors suffered from a rare form of collective frontal lobe damage, which made it seem like a good idea to put together a SpecGram book. The result in 2013 was The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics. In 2014, Editor Mikael Thompson entered a deep fugue ... [ more ]
Folk Linguistics. The SpecGram Folklore Elves™. You’ve got to remember that these are just simple linguaphiles. These are people of “little-𝓁” language. The common clay of the new Word. You know... morons. — Dʒim, Blazing Syllables Unravel the charm of language with this delightful collection of folk linguistic aphorisms. From idiomatic quirks to linguistic wonders, explore the charming wisdom (or lack thereof) of the common folk as they offer alleged insight into the colorful tapestry of human communication as they (attempt to?) navigate the intricate maze of words and meaning. The most effective way to learn a language is immersion because sound travels ... [ more ]
Lost Media: Linguistics Rock!. The SpecGram Media Elves™. In 1974, following the success of Schoolhouse Rock!, the independent production company Lingo Lango Longo released Linguistics Rock!, a linguistics-themed animated musical educational program similar in style to Schoolhouse Rock!. Unfortunately, the style, the branding, the episode titles, the characters, and the music were all very similar to Schoolhouse Rock!—so much so that Lingo Lango Longo’s Leado Lawyero, Leo Lombardo—in a stunning act of moral courage—pulled the plug on the whole enterprise before Lingo Lango Longo could be sued into oblivion. All that ... [ more ]
De La SpecGrammatologie . A Letter to Future Historians of Satirical Linguistics, from the Editor-in-Chief, Trey “Jacquey D” Jones. Future SpecGrammologists will debate whether this period in the history of SpecGram is “Early Modern” or “Late Moron” or even “Proto-Interplanetary”—and whether we were titans or pipsqueaks, our scribblings impactful or inconsequential. They will undoubtedly furrow their collective brow as they attempt to decipher the opaque and recalcitrant tea leaves of some future tattered remains of the SpecGram archive and hazard ill-formed guesses at our true meaning and significance. ... [ more ]
Evidence for Right Hemisphere Damage as a Result of Exposure to Slovene Humor. by D. Reindl, Rice University. Consider the following statement from Caplan (1987): 'Gardner and his colleagues (Gardner et al. 1983) have found that right-hemisphere damaged patients have difficulty in understanding jokes. They are unable to pick the ending of a story which is humorous; instead they often pick an ending which does not make sense but which is not particularly funny.' From this we might conclude that the endings which these patients do choose are able to satisfy their own demands for completing a joke (rather than that they themselves are unable to appreciate jokes) and that, perhaps, we simply do not understand the ... [ more ]
/ nuz baɪts /. Not a wire news service but still more reliable than most newspapers. Mass Arrests at Comparative Linguistics/Historical Linguistics Joint Conference. A conference meant to bring together work in comparative and historical linguistics concluded with the largest brawl ever seen since a phonologist pushed in front of a formalist at the buffet. Proceedings were going as planned until a Dr A. J. Ed argued that manuscript evidence proves that the correct term for a piece of equipment that takes people from one floor to another in a building was a “lift” and not an “elevator.” Comparative linguist Prof Niall Down disputed this result, quoting current practice in communities ... [ more ]
SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, Volume CLXV, Number 4; October 2012, MANAGING EDITOR Trey Jones SENIOR EDITOR Keith Slater EDITOR EMERITUS Tim Pulju Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLXV, No 4 CONSULTING EDITORS David J. Peterson Bill Spruiell, ASSOCIATE EDITORS Madalena Cruz-Ferreira Daniela Müller Mikael Thompson, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES Cem Bozsahin Florian Breit Jonathan Downie Adam Graham Tel Monks Mary Pearce Callum Robson Mary Shapiro Sheri Wells-Jensen, COMPTROLLER GENERAL Joey Whitford Stop Voicing Now! ... [ more ]
It’s been kind of a slow day so far.
It’s the crack of dawn somewhere. While those people get some coffee, here are some more items from the last 7 days that will keep you from being productive.
The SpecGram Ministry of Propaganda. Welcome to the SpecGram Ministry of Propaganda. The SpecGram Archive Elves™ have undertaken a project to digitize and share a sheaf of early 20th century SpecGram propaganda posters, which were used during the Great Linguistic War and the Second Linguistic War to encourage linguists everywhere to keep a stiff upper lip and a sense of humor during those trying times. We provide the digitized posters here for you to enjoy, retrospect on, and share. Select a poster to see a higher quality image, and for links to share on social media, to email friends, and to view or download the highest quality version of the image. ... Read SpecGram Every Month! ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian Volume CXCV, Number 2 Penultimate Issue Editor-in-Chief: Trey Jones; Executive Editors: Keith Slater, Mikael Thompson; Senior Editors: Jonathan Downie, Deak Kirkham, Vincent Fish; Contributing Editors: Pete Bleackley, Luca Dinu; Associate Editors: Yuval Wigderson, Daniel Swanson; Editorial Associates: Kenny Baclawski, Emily Davis, Gabriel Lanyi, Mark Mandel, Tel Monks; Comptroller General: Joey Whitford; All the Noise That’s Fit to Print; November 2025, ... [ more ]
Linguistic Contributions To The Formal Theory Of Big-Game Hunting1. R. Mathiesen, Brown University. The Mathematical Theory of Big-Game Hunting must surely be ranked among the major scientific achievements of the twentieth century. That this is so is largely the work of one man, H. Pétard, in whose fundamental paper (1938) certain recent advances in mathematics and physics were employed with great skill to create a theory of unmatched—not to say unmatchable!—power and elegance. One must not, of course, dismiss Pétard’s predecessors totally out of hand: the field had a long and distinguished history as a technology, was raised to the rank of a science by the ... [ more ] 
The Perplexed Linguist’s Guide to English Departments. Now with Footnotes! Athanasious Schadenpoodle. So, Dear Reader, you have completed your Ph.D. in Linguistics (yay you!), run headlong into the grim realities of the modern job market (poor you!), broadened your ideas about possible teaching contexts (smart you!) and landed a gig in an English department (lucky you?). You’ve potentially got the base of the Maslovian pyramid covered for at least a semester, but you’re in a rather alien environment, surrounded by people who talk funny in a way that Dialectology 501 never prepared you for and who have some markedly odd folkways. Some culture shock is inevitable, but a little knowledge can go a long ... [ more ]
Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics. by Trey Jones. As a service to our young and impressionable readers who are considering pursuing a career in linguistics, Speculative Grammarian is pleased to provide the following Gedankenexperiment to help you understand the possibilities and consequences of doing so. For our old and bitter readers who are too far along in their careers to have any real hope of changing the eventual outcome, we provide the following as a cruel reminder of what might have been. Let the adventure begin ... [ more ] 
Dimensional Feature Analysis of English Prepositions. CJ Quines. The missing preposition. Consider the three English prepositions in, on, and at. When we use these as spatial prepositions, we use them for referring to being located in a three-dimensional container, on a two-dimensional surface, or at a zero-dimensional point, respectively: The horse sleeps in the stable. The apple is on the table. Brian stood at the origin of the Cartesian plane. Missing from this paradigm is a preposition corresponding to one-dimensional locations. At first glance, we might believe that this function is also served by the preposition on, as in ... [ more ]
Shigudo, Reluctantly. Sir Edmund C. Gladstone-Chamberlain, Professor Emeritus of Linguistic Science, Department of Lexicology and Glottometrics, Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton. In 1963, at the tender age of 24, I found myself on an expedition deep in the Amazon Basin, up a smallish tributary of the Río Ucayali. There we encountered a well-established tribe of indigenous people, numbering close to 400 and living in relative isolation, who called themselves the Shigudo. Several members of the tribe spoke nearly fluent Spanish,1 and we were able to communicate quite effectively with them. As our expedition was chiefly anthropological in nature, and the Shigudo were, anthropologically ... [ more ]
The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics . For decades, Speculative Grammarian has been the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics—and now it is available in book form—both physical and electronic! We wish we were kidding,1 but no, seriously, we’ve published a large3 collection of SpecGram articles, along with just enough new material to force obsessive collectors and fans to buy it, regardless of the cost.4 From the Introduction: The past twenty-five years have witnessed many changes in linguistics, with major developments in linguistic theory, significant expansion ... [ more ]
SpecGram Puzzles and Games. Collected all in one place for your brain-teasing pleasure, below is a list of the currently available linguistically themed puzzles and games that have appeared over the years in SpecGram and related publications. Puzzles? Contents Acrostics | Anagrams | Choose Your Own Career | Crosswords | Cryptic Crosswords | Cryptograms | Domino Puzzles | Drop Quotes | EtymGeo™ | Fieldwork Puzzles | FonoFutoshiki | FonoNurikabe | HanjieLinguru | HashiWordakero | HitoriGuistiku | HomonimoKakuro | Interactive Fiction | IPA Code Puzzles | IPAlindromes | Language Identification | Latin Squares | LingDoku | Ling-Ken | L’Ishing | Logic Puzzles | Mad Libitum Games | Magic Squares | Masyu Ortograpiu ... [ more ]
Hey Linguists!—Get Them to Get You a Copy of The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics . Hey Linguists! Do you know why it is better to give than to receive? Because giving requires a lot more work! You have to know what someone likes, what someone wants, who someone is, to get them a proper, thoughtful gift. That sounds like a lot of work. No, wait. That’s not right. It’s actually more work to be the recipient—if you are going to do it right. You can’t just trust people to know what you like, what you want, who you are. You could try to help your loved ones understand a linguist’s needs and wants and desires—but ... [ more ]
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Last updated Feb. 14, 2026.