Letters to the Editor

My Dearest Dr. Quagga, (in care of the SpecGram Editors) In regards to my recently-published letter to the editor, and the reply by Dr. Equus Q. Quagga, I find I must retract my own ridiculous hypothesis. I see your point. I take back my comments. The Tiny Phoneme Hypothesis makes perfect sense to me now. In an unrelated matter, have you had your satellites serviced recently? The LingSTAR J-series are notoriously fickle concerning their GPS positioning. Thank you for the opportunity to be educated by so eminent a scholar as yourself. Edgars P. Allen Wonkatonk, Minnesota —— Dear Eds, We forwarded your message on to Dr. Quagga, again, in order to allow him to respond directly, again: Dear Mr. Allen, How insightful of you! We did a quick remote tune up of all of our series-J LingSTAR satellites, and discovered that the particular one mentioned in our recent correspondence was in fact out of alignment by several milliarcseconds, and therefore the house we were pointing at was not yours, but that of a neighbor several blocks away. Donnez mes salutations à votre épouse. Sincerely, Dr. Equus Q. Quagga Center for Geosynchronous Orbital Linguistics São Tomé and Príncipe —Eds. ********** 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. Dear Eds, Why on earth did SpecGram run an ad for frog food in the last issue? What does frog food have to do with linguistics? Sincerely, Chichiko Bendeliani Jandaba, Georgia —— Dear Chico (& the Man), Okay, so Morgenstern’s Frog Food may not, on the surface, seem like a particularly SpecGram-appropriate advertisement. However, many of Dr. Morgenstern’s lectures are of great interest to linguists. And while the matter of the frog food may be the least linguisticky of the bunch, behaviorism is at least tangentially relevant to linguistics at certain points in the time-space continuum. Also, it’s an ad, so it doesn’t have to be perfectly relevant as long as the check clears. (Which it did. Thanks Dr. Morgenstern!) —Eds. ********** SpecGram, I am writing to you concerning some much-needed clarification to the Ten New Commandments for Linguists, published in Collateral Descendant of Lingua Pranca. According to the words of Grammatikus, the footnote, which mandates the acceptance of the Oxford Comma, was added at a much later date than the original. It is likely that it was put in by those suffering from a form of comical OCD. The fact that it suggests the protest, of “editors,” is proof of it’s more recent insertion into the text, as stone tablet editors had not yet been invented at the time of Moses. Ronaldo Lorrenzo Jorge VonSperling-Dovenski —— Dear Ron, For a moment we were going to seriously consider “you’re” comment, until we noticed your use of “it’s” for “its”—which is clearly a sign of your apostrophestasy. Grammatikus would not be happy to have his words so casually tossed about by a punctuation heretic. —Eds.

	On Linguistic Death Cults—A Letter from the Managing Editor
	Pinnacle Sherpa is a Normal Language—A retraction of all previous conclusions—Keith W. Slater
	SpecGram Vol CLXII, No 4 Contents