SpecGram’s Endorsement for President

The Editorial Board of Speculative Grammarian

One of the most consequential presidential elections of our lives will be upon us soon and we, the Editorial Board of Speculative Grammarian, have decided to break with our tradition of non-partisanship and endorse a candidate for President of the American Dialect Society.

With no further pomp or circumstance, we hereby endorse Participle Party candidate, Vito Powers, whose bold and innovative platform—re-iterated below—is what is needed to shepherd the Society through our trying modern times.

Participle Party Platform

• Partner with the American Chiasmus Society to declare a Year of the Word.

• Ensure that no sentence is left fragmentary, providing comprehensive syntactic support and structure to all, regardless of clausal complexity.

• Found new research committees: Non-Human Dialects, Archaic Words that We Want to Bring Back, Emphatic and Obscene Hand Gestures, and others.

Larry Vander­grift, 2004, “Listen­ing to Learn or Learn­ing to Listen?”, Annual Review of Applied Linguis­tics, 24, pp. 3–25. Chiasmus of the Month October 2024

• Publish a large-print version of Publications of the American Dialect Society to be called Maxi-PADS.

• Promote the use of sesquipedalian words alongside the monosyllabic, ensuring an extensive and usefully variegated vocabulary for all: “A deep lexicon lifts all dialects.”

• Support morphological creativity, encouraging all speakers to blend, compound, and inflect freely, without fear of grammatical persecution.

• Promote an increase in mandatory and elective K-12 and post-secondary linguistics education.

• Help out the Northern Cities shift by digging up Chicago and moving it to Detroit, Detroit to Cleveland, and Cleveland to Buffalo. Buffalo will be given free to the first claimant or dumped into Lake Erie, where it might actually improve water quality, as well as addressing the well-documented problem of cyclic intimidation among the local bison.

• Promote mutual intelligibility and respect among all dialects, from the most prestigious to the most stigmatized, celebrating our rich linguistic diversity.

• Foster a society where idioms flourish and metaphors are richly woven into the fabric of our daily speech.

• Develop a diplomatic affairs program, centered on a robust linguistic ambassadorial project (limited to non-Commonwealth nations) that encourages continued and future standardization on American variants in spelling and pronunciation.

• Recognize that the gung-ho “mi casa es su casa” attitude that has fostered a tsunami of lexical immigration—resulting in a bona fide smörgåsbord of lexical options that give our Volkssprache a certain je ne sais quoi—has also been the sine quā nōn without which English would not have become the bon vivant, wunderkind, de facto lingua franca it is today.

• Reduce the vowel gap, ensuring that every phoneme gets equal representation in our phonemic inventory, regardless of consonantality or syllabicity.

• Reduce our reliance on Generative Grammar, with a goal of becoming 100% Chomsky-free by 2045.

• Ensure our continued ability to project illocutionary force around the world, with the capability of simultaneously engaging in two major linguistic conflicts in different parts of the world.

• Open a branch of the Society in the UK for candidates who prefer to stand for a seat instead of running.

• Continue to strive to end preposition stranding with our signature “No Preposition Left Behind” program.

• Replace the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) with The Regional US Thesauric Handbook (TRUTH).

• Redefine all linguistic terms to give equal opportunities to all scholars, even ones who don’t own textbooks.

• Mandate a weight-training program for English weak verbs.

• Advocate for simplification of English orthography, cutting through the red tape of silent letters and irregular spellings, to create a more phonetic and accessible writing system for all. Who are we kidding? English spelling is a veritable sh*tshow, but we are here for it!

• Raise an army and navy, then rename to the American Language Society.

	Letters to the Editor
	SpecGram Vol CXCIV, No 2 Contents