SpecGram—Most Popular Pages

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 ]

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 ]

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, 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 ]

ADVERTISEMENT SpecGram Estates. A Retirement Community By Linguists, For Linguists¹. The second greatest day in the life of a linguist is when they become tenured—the status, the glory, the freedom! The greatest day in the life of a linguist is when they become emeritus—the status, the glory, the freedom! Come and spend your golden years with us at SpecGram Estates; we understand you like no one else does, and we have the accommodation, the community, and the amenities that are just right for you! We all know that different linguists have different expectations of the world. At SpecGram Estates we personalize your retirement experience, creating ... [ more ]

Rotokan Revelations. Franny Irchow, A.R. McHair Institute for Armchair Linguistics, South Carolina. Rotokas is a Papuan language of New Guinea known for its very small and not particularly distinctive phoneme set. The wide variation in pronunciation has led to not-so-specific descriptions, such as declaring the voiced consonants (commonly written as V/v, R/r, and G/g in the Rotokas alphabet) to be “allophonic sets”: [β b, m], [ɾ n, l, d], and [ɡ ɣ ŋ]. Also of note, while Rotokas has a vowel-length distinction, it has (or is claimed to have—we shall see!) no other suprasegmental distinctions. Finally, early investigators (Firchow & Firchow, ... [ more ]

Pseudo-Psiblings™ And Other Views of Multiply-Blended Families. A proposal for improving and clarifying family nomenclature for the 21st century. by Trey Jones. Introduction. Language evolves—otherwise we’d all be able to read Beowulf in the original, right? Sometimes language changes in response to cultural changes. But sometimes it doesn’t change fast enough to keep up with cultural changes. This paper seeks to give English a little push in a much-needed direction. There has been a fairly radical change in Western society in the last hundred years or so. It used to be that if a woman was on her fourth husband, one automatically felt a little sorry for ... [ more ]

Rasmus Rask Zigzag Puzzle XX. by Lila Rosa Grau. This is the twentieth Rasmus Rask puzzle, devoted to the original Mr. Charming Scandinavian Linguist. The puzzle is similar to a crossword puzzle, in that there is a grid for filling in words and phrases, and clues for the ACROSS and DOWN directions. However, all the squares in a Rasmus Rask puzzle are filled with letters, and the answers to the clues may (but are not required to) overlap. Clues for a particular row or column are given together, in the order they appear in the grid. No indication of the amount of overlap between clues is given. Letters spelling out RASMUS RASK zigzag down the grid to provide a framework for filling in the answers. The ... [ more ]

Increasing Linguistic Self-Referentiality in Weird Ways. Γραμματο-Χαοτικον. As part of our ongoing mission to make the world of language a lot more interesting, we want to encourage our members—and the general language-using public—to increase the unusual self-referentiality of language. As an illustration, the word weird is a little weird, because it doesn’t follow the i-before-e rule.^* We propose that, for example, out of whack and wacky should be made slightly out of whack and slightly wacky, respectively, by pronouncing them with the opposite ... [ more ]

Linguimericks & The Lingumerickocalypse, Book १०५. Though tempted I am to critique The French orthographic physique, When comparing with English I find naught to distinguish, So I’m saying they both have “mystique” —Roman C. S. Pelling, There truly is just a small touch Of irony, not very much, That the Teutonic sounds In Germany’s towns Aren’t called by the apt name of “Dutch” —Joost van Deutscher, Common Sense[i]s My Japanese Linguistics teacher told me, ‘Antonyms are pairs of lexemes with opposing senses; Lexeme A has sense A and lexeme B has sense not-A. Common sense, eh?’ As this definition opposed my senses, I asked, ‘Teacher, ... [ more ]

The SpecGram Linguistic Advice Collective. Are you in a world of linguistic hurt? The SpecGram Linguistic Advice Collective (SLAC) will offer you empirical, empathic, emphatic advice you can use!^* Remember, if you can tell the difference between good advice and bad advice, then you don’t need advice! So, if you need advice, trust us—and cut yourself some SLAC! ... Dear SLAC, My favourite satirical linguistics journal is closing down. What can I do? Yours disconsolately —B. Reft ... My dear secondary flotation device, The answer is obvious: You must join their editorial board and take over. Seize the means of joke production, the joke means of production, and the mean jokes ... [ more ]

The Evocative Case: New Data from Nahuatlepec de Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Adam Baker. This brief article presents data from Nahuatlepec de Santiago Ramón y Cajal, with a focus on the evocative case, which has not previously been described in the literature. The evocative case is used in narrative and hortatory texts to evoke an emotional response from the listener. This will be most easily seen from the free translations below. Data. The language has a surface SOV word order, and basic nominative-accusative case marking, as seen below. (1) jast-na, boy-NOM kutme-s-ta, mother-3POSS-ACC ord, see.PST “The boy saw his mother.” The evocative case marker can replace any other case marker in ... [ more ]

Warehouse Moving Sale. We’ve lost the lease on our warehouse and anything we can’t sell we have to move—or rent interns from Speculative Grammarian to do it—and that’s expensive! Help us out and buy a book—or twelve! 15% discount on orders over $387.49! Footnoten: Traversal Strategies in Recursive Footnote Numbering Schemes. F. Ußnote. 2003. 463pp. “Explores depth-first vs breadth-first traversal strategies while decrying hierarchical sub-notes as an ‘academic aberration’.” Price: $2. Punctuated Novelty Historical Trends in—and the Trendy History of—Novel Punctuation ... [ 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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

Further Studies in Multilingual Stimuli Incongruence. An Experimental Study Preregistration. Badkamer Schildpad Syrup. J. Ridley Stroop, my sixteenth cousin four times removed, is famous for his 1935 experiment demonstrating that naming the color of a word is more difficult when the word is itself the name of a different color. For example: RED GREEN BLUE. Less well known is that our extended family—particularly the Syrup branch—is particularly competitive. As a result, ever since I began studying experimental psychology, my parents and grandparents have waged a never-ending campaign encouraging me to “keep up with the Stroops” and “out-Stroop ... [ more ]

Linguistics & The Beginner’s Mind. Keʜ Ɯo Ɯᴎʜ Þн.δ. Кеп Ѕһо Ѕһіп Рһ.ԁ. & ’Enzō ’Enrȳ ’Einz̄ ’Enrīquez, Ph.đ. The beginner’s mind is eager, open, and free from preconceptions. Sure, experts know a whole lot about their chosen field, but that very expertise (alloyed with a heavy dose of often tragicomic ὕβρις) can lead said experts to think they know a lot about every field—a fact those who guard the gates of linguisticdom against marauding hordes of physicists and the occasional rogue ... [ 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 ]

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