Dear Editors,

I can’t find a fax address for Psammeticus Press, so I am sending this to you.

In their ad for Recruiting Linguistics Students, the Psammeticans (or their PR department) wrote:

As all humanities departments have discovered, being smart and studying interesting things just doesn’t cut it with university administrators anymore.

Um, no. All humanities departments may have heard that through the grapevine, but only a few have actual real-world experience, or even actual experience in the academic world, in being smart and studying interesting things.

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Dear Miss Prissy Priss,

We contacted the Ps Press PR Pdepartment (that last p is silent, though etymologically correct). Senior Executive VP of MarketSpeak, Ward “Buzz” I. Novation, replied.

Ah, you caught us. Our academic copy consultants tend to use “be X” in an autoanalytic sense, meaning roughly “thinking (within one’s self-contained world view) it to be the case that X”.

Diagnoses of Autoanalytic Syndrome have risen dramatically in recent years. Doctors are divided, though, on whether this is because the phenomenon is actually on the increase, or whether its operational definition has changed to include a lot of cases that used to be considered “normal”.

Autoanalytic Syndrome is not the same as Framework Psychosis, though the two often occur together. One is the incapability of looking outside of one’s own realm of experience, while the other is the incapability of seeing things except through a particular theoretical model. Neither is particularly dangerous if quarantined within a university building, though in that context both contribute to frequent instantiations of Sayre’s Law.

We’ll send the consultants back to the reëducation camp and see if we can beat the Syndrome out of them.

Sincererly,
—Buzz / Ward

That’s a refreshingly honest answer, don’tcha think, Prissy?

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Hi, Everyone!

I’m writing from Sunny Florida where I’m going to a really great conference on Educational Linguistics. I don’t know what you have in your magazine-journal, but I bet it’s good. They told us what this is and it sounds really hard. Here’s a quote from the invitation: “transdisciplinary research as well as work that cuts across or combines areas in various ways (e.g., SLA and language ideologies, pedagogy and policy, literacy and sociolinguistics, among many other possibilities). It is this openness to applying a potentially wide range of perspectives to investigating language (in) education issues that is the hallmark of educational linguistics.”

I don’t know about all that, I just wanted to say hi and GO LINGUISTICS!

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Dear Ms. L’Hiver,

Sounds like you got schooled. Congrats.

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Dear Editors,

I am writing in response to your editorial “The Safety is Off”. Editor Thompson needs to brush up on his Austronesian languages. A trigger warning is nothing but a misunderstanding of an applicative warning.

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Dear Dr. Phil,

Abandon all side effects, ye who press “enter” here.

Dear Editors,

Two years ago, JD & AY wrote to you with a candidate for Chiasmus of the Year 2013. After the brutal rejection they received, I reworked my own chiasmus-related strategy for fame and notoriety and redoubled my efforts, and now humbly propose to you a candidate for Chiasmus of the Year 2015, from that inimitable wordsmith Demi Lovato:

Got my mind on your body

And your body on my mind.

—Demi Lovato, “Cool for the Summer”

As you can clearly see, Ms. Lovato subverts the standard chiastic trope by cunningly saying the exact same thing twice, thus easily elevating these lines above quotidian chiasmoi, and thus I believe that she is more than worthy of receiving this high honor. I await your response to my submission with equal measures of optimism and dread.

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Yo yo yo, Whaddup Y-Dub!

As discussed previously, one of the requirements for Periodic Chiasmoi is that nominees must be in an actual human language. Your submission from Ms. Lovato qualifies in that regard, unlike JD & AY’s from Ms. Cyrus. Another requirement is that the candidate submission at least purport to serve some useful academic purpose. While summer is a challenging subject, it is quite possible to write productively on the topic.

There are yet other requirements, but they, like all high-quality constraints, do not reveal themselves until they are violated.

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Dear Editors,

Recent issues of SpecGram have featured advertisements from Son of SpeckGramm, the self-described International Predatory Journal of Linguistics, and Peculative Grammarian, a lecture service.

In both cases, the names of the organizations in question are remarkably close to Speculative Grammarian / SpecGram, though each disclaims any affiliation or endorsement with your esteemed journal. Aren’t you worried about confusion, or at the very least, brand dilution?

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Dear Meemaw,

We cashed their checks, took their money, invested it wisely, and used it to fund the undermining of their core business through synergies derived from NLP (both the good kind and the bad kind).

There can be only one!

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Dear Sirs/Ma’ams/Assorted Others, Furry and Otherwise:

I recently received an email from my old department addressed “Dear Alumnus/na.” This set me thinking: By the end of grad school I felt like an exhausted subhuman brainless critter, so maybe for grad students they should use the term “alumnum.”

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Dear Garnet,

We wholeheartedly concur. It’s kind of like “aluminum”, a light, flimsy, cheap, mass-produced metal glutting the market, only without the “I”.

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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.