From the Archives!—The Rejected Paper

The SpecGram Archive Elves™

As previously reported, our very own Butch McBastard unearthed a satchel of papers and other miscellanea labeled, “Top Secret SpecGram Time Capsule, 1964—Do Not Open for 50 Years!” The intermittent wrangling with the SpecGram legal team over potential incriminating evidence proprietary information continues, but we are again able to share with our readers some of the treasures found within the satchel.

Here is a photo of the tenth archival item, a paper entitled “On the Modern Equivalence of Methodological Work to Paired-Utterance Conformity over a Corpus of Utterance Tokens in Über-Philology”, submitted to Speculative Grammarian on April 1, 1899, by Holger Pedersen, Otto Jespersen, Henry Sweet, Karl Brugmann, Eduard Sievers, and Ferdinand de Saussure.

Unfortunately, we no longer have any of the accompanying editorial commentary associated with this paper. Though the title page—which bears the standard red “REJECTED” stamp so many submissions receive—is shown stapled to other pages, those other pages appear to be scrap.

It isn’t clear what happened with this paper. Perhaps it was submitted as a joke, either by some or all of the purported authors, or by others, either as nothing but a title page, or attached to additional scrap pages. It is also possible that one of the editors or interns neglected to notice the joke. Or, it could have been a serious piece that was rejected—as so many are—for failing to live up to its initial promise.

More to come...

	From the Archives!—The SpecGram Rare Book Collection—The SpecGram Archive Elves™
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	SpecGram Vol CLXIX, No 2 Contents