SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 ]

A Morphosyntactic, Semantic, Pragmatic, Sociolinguistic and Literary Investigation into the Psycholinguistic Mechanisms Underlying English Puns. Pete Bleackley, Associate Editor. On her website Lang 101¹ my highly steamed^{2, 3} editorial colleague Madalena Cruz-Ferreira prompts: Try now to think about jokes involving structural ambiguity (morphological structure, syntactic form or syntactic function). As before, explain the source of the humour, in an unambiguous manner! While the answer I gave on her website correctly explained the structural ambiguity present in the joke, it was far from an exhaustive analysis of the source of the humour. I here expand on it to present a more ... [ 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 ]

A Preliminary Field Guide to Linguists, Part One. Athanasious Schadenpoodle, University of Nueva Escranton. Introduction While naturalists have long observed the behaviors of some of the better-known families within the Order Academica, producing for the lay person such fascinating and useful volumes as Jane's Guide to Physicists and The Sierra Club Picture Guide to Psychologists, the Family Linguistica has so far not been shown a great deal of attention. This is, in part, justifiable--the small numbers of linguists, and their comparatively drab plumage, draws fewer amateur naturalists. Still, there is a need for at least one major publication on the subject. While the ... [ more ]

Are Turkish and Amharic Related? Are They Ever!. by, April May June, Freshman in Elementary Education, Indiana University at Bloomington. It is — "Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — well-known from my L103 class that Turkish and Amharic supposedly aren't related, though it is no longer clear which languages they are related to. However, I have found lots of words in the two languages which sound alike and mean the same thing in only two months of hearing them spoken in two local restaurants. The similarities first caught my attention during an argument at the Turkish restaurant in which the owner kept saying "sought." ... [ more ]

Linguistics Nerd Camp. Bethany Carlson. With all of his dissertation ideas shot down ruthlessly, Warren began to wonder if there was a place for him in linguistics ... [ more ]

A Redundancy— and Revitalisation— of Competencies: Competence in Competence. Compo Tenz, Professor in Competence, University of Comptance in Quompuy, Tennessee. When the undergraduate student of linguistics has finally hacked her way through the left-periphery,¹ drawn more tree diagrams than there are trees in the Amazon,² merged move with whatever move merges with, and bared the structure of her fazed soul before bare phrase structure, often all that will be left at the end may be a residual echo of some vague recollection of the flitting memory of the idea of Chomskyan competence; to wit: the ideal speaker-listener in a perfectly homogenous ... (you know the ... [ more ]

On the Speculative Grammarian. A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. We are often asked¹ why we don’t use “the” in front of “Speculative Grammarian” in the name of our journal. It’s a noun like any other, after all. Many inquire whether we are against determiners for some reason.², ... The organisers of the conference Quality of Models and Models of Quality,; October 2015, in Stockholm, Sweden. Chiasmus of the Month; May 2015, It’s a perfectly good question. Most of our staff have become so used to the name Speculative Grammarian that we interpret “the Speculative Grammarian” as using “celebrity ... [ more ]

A Short History of American Linguistics*. Tim Pulju. Reprinted, with permission, from Historiographia Linguistica, XVIII:1.221-246 (1991), with minor updates and a new afterword by the author. *It has occurred to the Editor of this Journal [Historiographia Linguistica] that the History of Linguistics as an academic subject has sufficiently progressed during the past fifteen or more years to allow for this spoof to be printed in HL without being mistaken for proper scholarship. Indeed, after all the drudgery of historical research and the seriousness of reflection on matters of methodology and philosophical argument, we may be permitted to enjoy some lighter moments in our day-to-day ... [ more ]

ADVERTISEMENT Occam’s Taser. Governments, Do your internal security forces find that truncheons and handcuffs can be non-parsimonious? Studies indicate that a pair of handcuffs is needed for each criminal and that water cannon only drench on average 12% of unruly, rioting crowds. But there is an answer. Equip your security forces with the all-new Occam’s Taser. It’s a cheap and easy method of controlling disorder and suppressing dissent in an effective and efficient way. It’s not philosophy! Buy Occam’s Taser today! (Batteries not supplied) ... [ more ]

On the Proto-Indo-European Origin of ‘Twerk’. Mark Butcher & Mark Candlestick-Maker, Department of PIE Studies, Pecan University. A common question asked of linguists these days, to our collective dismay, is “What is the etymology of ‘twerk’?”¹ Twerking is a dance craze with respectable origins in the New Orleans bounce music scene,² but it has enraged millions in recent years for reasons we would rather avoid writing about. Several authors have speculated that the term is a clipping of ‘footwork’ or a portmanteau of ‘twist’ and ‘jerk’³ (foolish speculation, we know). We will make the case that the word is of ... [ more ]

PAID ADVERTISEMENT — http://SpecGram.com/PaniniPress New from Panini Press! . Word Problems for Linguists ❦पा by Barbara Millicent Roberts, Ph.D. Department of Applied Mathematical Linguistics Handler University Published 2025. 194 pg. Linguists! You’ve spent years dissecting syntax trees, contemplating the very origin of language itself, and arguing about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the Voynich manuscript with clueless neckbeards online—safe in the knowledge that you’d never again have to do anything more mathematically complicated than figure out the tip on your dinner bill—and if you have tenure, you don’t even have to do ... [ more ]

Ask Grammaticality Brown. Q: I want to relocate my Whytree, Whobush and Whatplants (possibly with some Howpansies) to the leftmost part of my garden. Is there a mechanism to do this without them losing integrity or constituency? A: The leftmost part of the garden can be a crowded place! Topicalus focusensis often thrives there and few gardens can consider themselves complete without a focusensis, I’m sure you agree! However, if you carefully lift up the whole plant with all its roots and move it in an iterative stepwise movement, you can usually get it the area of land where you want to site it (or the landing site if you will!). P.S. A word of warning if your garden has, as many of the best gardens ... [ more ]

A Time of Unprecedentedly “Unprecedented Times”. A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief. In these unprecedented times, it is important to not lose our heads; we must remain calm and steadfast in the face of adversity in these unprecedented times, joining together—while maintaining the appropriate social distance in these unprecedented times—for the common good. However, unless the times become even more unprecedented and some virus mutates one of your loved ones into a flesh-eating zombie, or the virus itself grows to the size of a beachball and begins chasing you through your garden,¹ there is no excuse for wildly inaccurate speech,² even in ... [ more ]

Spanish Wins EUSLISS Again!. Unigraphemic Correspondent I V K¹. Regular readers of SpecGram will be almost entirely unsurprised, if just a touch disappointed, to learn that once again Spanish has won the European Unigraphemic/Single-letter Lexeme International Sport-Symposium (EUSLISS). At the glamorous, star-studded² event in Strasbourg last week, Spanish once again entered its six monovocalic lexemes, ⟨a⟩ ⟨e⟩ ⟨i⟩ ⟨o⟩ ⟨u⟩ and ⟨y⟩ and as with previous years, the judges considered this to be the best overall unigraphemic/single-letter lexeme entry. The predictable result is that the ... [ more ]

Meeting Regulations for the, International Ambiguity Society/, Société d’Ambigüité Internationale. A meeting will be presided over by the president and the chairperson or the scrimshander. No member may bring motions or call for voting without the express permission of the presiding officer. To comply with standards, meetings will be held in a room with unlockable doors, and members will wear inflammable shoes with untieable laces. The scribe shall submit a summary of all statements made at the end of the meeting. Every member has the right to sit in one chair. All members are not allowed to take personal phone calls during meetings. The presiding officer may only berate members who are absent. The ... [ more ]

The Middle Finger, Having Flipped, Moves On .... A Letter from the Managing Editor. ... and so should you, dear shareholders: nor all your whining nor lawsuits shall lure it back to cancel half a bird. As most of our readers surely remember from the last issue, we had a very public and slightly testy exchange with some of our more obnoxious shareholders in this space. Apparently our initial sortie against our arrogant aggressors was more than a bit preliminary. I can’t go into too many details because a ridiculously confidential but legally binding settlement has been reached among several concerned parties. However, the ultimate upshot is that “we, the Editorial Board of Speculative Grammarian, are ... [ more ]

Of the Abnegation of the Institute of Imladris. Found among the papers of J. R. R. Tolkien by Deak Kirkham. And so it came to pass that, towards the end of the Third Age of the Sun, Aragorn son of Arathorn was born in Eriador. And he came to live at the house of Elrond, Imladris, as the Elves called it, at the foot of the Misty Mountains. And he grew in strength and wisdom but also became deeply amorous of the Lord Elrond’s beautiful daughter, the Lady Undómiel and so she for him. As time passed, not only did their love flourish but through their long talks together, they developed a shared sense of commerce, a sharp financial acuity and a profound grasp of the business opportunities in Middle-Earth in that ... [ more ]

Linguimericks, Book १०२—Letters & Leftovers. Letters How curiously spelt is English! Its users will oftentimes wish That one sound, one letter Might be somewhat better Than a script that spells pisces as ⟨ghoti⟩ —Constance K. Phonetik, So ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨sh⟩ (there’s more!) And ⟨th⟩ and ⟨ph⟩ (that’s phour!) Should be all monographs. Yes, ŝurely so, ĉaps, As the great Ludoviko foresaw —Esther-Esmerelda D’Esperanza D’Esperanto, It’s a mad, crazee linear mix And to learn it takes ages—and sucks. A to Z Latinate: Orthographical fate. And why, God, oh why 26? ... [ more ]

Letters to the Editor. [Note: We recently “acquired” nearly a score of the mail sorting machines that have been decommissioned by the U.S. Postal Service this year, which allowed us to sort through a backlog of over a dozen lakh letters. As always, our bounty becomes your bounty —Eds. ] Dear Sirs and Mesdames, Regarding footnote 6 in your May editorial earlier this year, the official AΦA (American Φάρμακο- lɪŋɡwɪstɪks Association) guidance is that Xyntax has been deprecated as a sedative. Vowelium and Pronounzac have generally been considered to be safer and more effective. However, our newly released and substantially improved ... [ more ]

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