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 Marks. Virgula A. Sterism. 2024. 784pp. “Writing has been described as a ‘secondary technology’ to true language, a view which seems to relegate punctuation to the role of a mere tertiary panel of minor knobs and dials on such machinery And, in the parlance of linguistics( ), punctuation is generally considered a closed class, like prepositions—(modulo iff and iff we ignore modulo.~)—not entirely unable, but extremely unlikely and unwilling to admit new members. ⁂ Yet, a host of ( )visionary cranks and cranky visionaries( ) have imagined that the often trifling jots and tittles of punctuation could offer more to readers and writers, beyond the usual abatement of structural ambiguity—often extending so far as to address matters of ambiguity in emotion and tone ” Price: $24.99.
Linguist: The Hobby Project. Spruiell Williams. 2012. 325pp. “The typical RPG allows one to play characters who engage in exploration and conflict as a means of improving their personal power and acquiring greater resources; they permit an intricate group-generated metaphorical Bildungsroman without the pesky downsides of the adult end-state. LTHP is similar, but of course has to recast these basic game traits in ostensibly academic forms. Resources are conceptualized as data and funding; personal power becomes standing in an academic community, with its attendant greater chance that one’s arguments will be given more weight. Loot remains somewhat constrained, alas, since these are linguists we’re talking about.” Price: £34.99.
A Lone Wolf in Black Sheep’s Clothing. Elias Þorne. 1985. 238pp. “A deep-cover morphophoneticist within a syntactical terror cell discovers his university deans have disavowed him, forcing him to hunt down his own funding from the inside to survive the semester.” Price: $2.95.
Encyclopedia of Linguistic Urban Legends. Јаи Нагоλԁ Вгциѵаиԁ. 2002. 555p. “We’ve all heard the stories that are so bizarre that they must be can’t be true—from Bigfeet to Spring-Tongued Jack, many popularized by Jʚsɘph Cɑɱpbɛɬɭ—but do you know the Muffling Man or the Double Devoiced Dachshund? This comprehensive tome brings all of them into your home in a readable collection of hundreds of legends, regional variants, and scholarly interpretations.” Price: $12.50.
Are Computational Linguists Evil? Evidence Says Yes! April May June. 2019. 98pp. “No other linguistic discipline ‘launches daemons’, ‘kills children with a fork’, or encourages action sequences such as unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes, fsck, fsck, fsck, umount, sleep. What are these degenerates up to?” Price: 5¢.
Nine is New. Bedeauinguie d’Épâcquetinque. 2004. 288pp. “Explores the widespread similarity among Indo-European languages between the words for “new” and “nine”—nuevo/nueve, neuf/neuf, nieuw/negen, neu/neun, nove/nuove, ny/ni, navah/na’va, newydd/naw, etc.—and proposes that for a long time eight fingers were enough, but before leaving the Urheimat, the Proto-Indo-Europeans discovered that they needed a new number to count even higher.” Price $10. New Price: $9.
Morphemoidal Productivitude: The Fine-ish Line Between “Productive Morpheme” and “Mental Illness”. Anonymous. 2011. 182pp. “Excess use of humorous yet useful morphemes—e.g., -oidal and -ish—can lead to their obsessive application.” Price: $3.
Optimal Mac ’n’ Cheese. P. Tulju. c. 2011. 32pp. “Unpublished Manuscript. Defines and ranks the constraints necessary to properly order the actions in making mac ’n’ cheese.” Price: $25¢/page.
Thieveretical and Piratical Aspects of Linguistics. R. G. Matey. 2018. 192pp. “Evaluates longstanding academic quandaries using a piratical moral framework, reframing negative-valence issues—such as ‘plagiarizing obscure and hard to find works’—as moral goods—‘plundering lost treasures’.” Price: $0 if you can find a copy online.
The Espek Garam Creole. B. McBastard. 1954. 433pp. “Describes a language descended from the artificially constrained English of the SpecGram interns who ‘chose’ to remain on Nauru in the 1880s, set themselves up to live like princes on the backs of locals, while teaching them a ‘joke’ form of English involving phoneme-eating morphemes, pig-latin inflections, verlan-style inflections, and recursive center-embedding.” Price: $7.
In Praise of “Crazy” Rules. C. Searsplainpockets. 2026. 322pp. “The twentieth century’s most esteemed outré anthropological linguist argues that apparently “crazy” rules in languages—such as sibilant voicing conditioned on the weather, vowel fronting conditioned on one’s choice of footwear, or reduplication patterns aligned with days of the week—should be investigated, as they are often echos of anthropologically interesting historical developments.” Price: $10.
The Lost Magical Etymology of Lay and Lie. Buttknot Foe-Gottun, Esq.—Twelfth Level Mage. 1682. 34¾pp. “Recounts the story of Prescott Calhoun Riptivist, the leader of a sect of linguomagicians, whose lover lied about who she had been laying down with. In response he performed an arcane linguomagical rite to merge the two so that it would be impossible to lay down without lying.” Price: 47 gp.
Linguistic Meta-Units—Filling the Lacunæ. Anne S. O’Morphism. 2002. 135pp. “Proposes useful units in the field of linguistics, such as the pike—one phonology’s worth of minimal pairs, or the chomsky—the length of time it takes a theorist to rephrase what competing camps are doing in a way that allows plausibly deniable incorporation into his own theory.” Price: $1.
Cat Dictionary. F. Lion. 1979. 42pp. “Features humorous lexicographical inventions such as ‘oʊnɚ: chief servant’ and ‘t͡ʃɪldɹən: at best, smaller, louder, and even more useless servants; at worst, simian terrorists’.” Price: 89¢.
Why Satan Speaks Latin. Hermes Tessaresmegistus. 1887. “The alleged son of Hermes Trismegistus brings his Victorian-era sensibility to the question of why a near-eternal entity such as the Prince of Lies would continue to favor the speech patterns of a particular set of humans from a particular place and time. He flips the question on its head by proposing that certain successful groups—Roman Emperors, lawyers, academics—instead are required to use Satanic speech as part of their Satanic Pacts.” Price: 2s 6d.
U.N.K.‘s -unk Pandemic Response Ontology. Riva Courson & Dionne Vicente. 2023. 154pp. “Researchers from the University of Nugatory Knowledge (U.N.K.) explore why the hunk/chunk/drunk/monk ontology for responses to the COVID-19 pandemic was so popular, and propose novel explanations for the optimality of /-ʌŋk/ as an organizing principle for such an ontology.” Price: 1¢.
TractorLangs: The New Hi-Tech Replacement for AuxLangs. I. M. A. Farmer. 2014. 117pp. “Ayup, right there what is done said on the tin.” Price: $2.
Grimm’s Law. John Grimmshamm. 1992. 433pp. “Serious and respected German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist J. L. ‘Karl’ Grimm, along with his younger trouble-making brother W. ‘Karl’ Grimm, find themselves at the crossroads of modern law and fairytale contracts after an ill-advised entanglement with Oberon and Titania.” Price: $3.99.
Titivillus. John Welsh. 1987. 238pp. “In the spirit of Kirill Eskov’s The Last Ringbearer, John Gardner’s Grendel, Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, and Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, John Welsh’s Titivillus reveals the hidden true story of Titivillus, the demon tasked with collecting the errors of scribes and mispronunciations of priests. Between his overbearing boss, nagging wife, and nattering children, Titivillus can barely get a word in edgewise and never has a chance to rest. Poor Titivillus!” Price: $0.99.
The Generativist’s Daft Logic Twist. David Emilis. 2019. 294pp. “Recounts a series of plausible sound changes to derive the term generativist from the phrase daft logic twist, explores why this is a more plausible etymology than the one we are usually given, and expounds on the implications and repercussions for the field of Syntax and Linguistics as a whole.” Price: $5.99.
Prime Movers: Linguomathematical Drama Among the Fralmśichphreå. Claudette & Helgi von Helganschtein Searsplainpockets. 2026. 314pp. “The Fralmśichphreå use a prime-factorization-based counting system—translated as one, double-one, three, double-double, five, double-three, seven, double-double-double, three-three, double-five, eleven, double-double-three, and so on. In 2025 Fralmśichphreån mathematicians and linguists convened in Longyearbyen, Norway to discuss their computational inability to give names to certain large numbers, and to debate a proposal to officially adopt new naming shortcuts popular among younger Fralmśichphreå, such as ‘Mersenne-127’, and counterproposals to call it ‘Mersenne-Mersenne-7’, or even ‘Mersenne-Mersenne-Mersenne-Mersenne-2’.” Price: 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,727 $ZWD.
The Man Who Was Syntax: A Nightmare. Found Among the Papers of G.K. Chesterton by Joan Treynor. 1910/1980. 200pp. “Classicist Simon Gabriels is recruited by Scotland Yard to join a secret Anti-Lexicalist philologist corps and finagles his way into a secret meeting of a local Lexicalist Council, where he is accidentally elected to take on the persona of Syntax and represent the local Lexicalists at the central council in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” Price: $3.
Shape-Based Classifiers, Obesity, and Familial Dynamics Among the Yuturaond. Claude Searsplainpockets. 2002. 54pp. “Shape-based classifiers in Yuturaond have historically used the ‘long-skinny-object’ classifiers for humans, but recent increases in obesity among the Yuturaond have led to the occasional use of the ‘round-object’ classifier for some individuals by their family members.” Price: $8.
Classifying Null Allomorphs. Nils Nilsby. 1998. 129pp. “Argues that null allomorphs are not cross-linguistically homogeneous, but rather mixtures of six base types: forward (∅), backward (⦰), left (⦴), right (⦳), flat (⦱), and round (⦲).” Price: $10.00.
As If. Azzif Hassiff. 2000. 225pp. “A moody romantic tale of conditional, subjunctive, and irrealis love made real.” Price: $2.99.
The Rise of Back-Formed Prestigious Singulars. Γραμματο-Χαοτικον. 1994. 67pp. “A leaked internal report on an early success by the Γραμματο-Χαοτικον in encouraging college students to use singulars back-formed from more prestigious plural varieties. Covers parenthesee, matricee, and appendicee.” Price: $1.50.
Lingua Litera—Broken Promises, Broken Dreams, Broken Jaws. Jehl O. Djurnolisst. 2006. 167pp. “Explosive exposé on the 2001 scandal surrounding Lingua Litera, a company that provided literal tongue transplants to language learners with the promise of ‘Obviating language classes, one tongue at a time’. Follows the morbid case of Polly Galotta, who has at least 8 cadaver tongues implanted in her mouth, and the more general story of the downfall of Lingua Litera.” Price: $4.
Whispering Trees: Linguistic Conspiracy Theories from “The Internet”. K. N. Spiro-Torr. 2015. 12,097pp (8 volumes). “A shallow and unexamined retelling of ‘popular’ theories from the internet, including the idea that syntax trees are Satanic, HAARP is accelerating Canadian Raising and the Northern Cities Vowel Shift by creating phonotronic energy fluctuations, vocal fry is becoming more common because it’s one of the speech characteristics of the Reptilian Overlords, there are no real three-vowel phonemic systems and the idea that they exist is part of Masonic plot, and the faux Latin phrases used in Harry Potter are very close to real Latin phrases that actually are magical.” Price: $2 plus $79.95 shipping per set.
The Construction Gap: The Failure of Linguistic Architecture. Jack O’Trades. 2001. 278pp. “The author expounds on his ‘sore disappointment’ that Construction Grammar is a grammar of language, and not a language of construction, similar to the language of architectural patterns found in A Pattern Language by Alexander, et al. ‘I expected computational linguists, who work with computer scientists and software architects, to have done better.’ ” Price: $1.
Harvard Law of Animal Behavior. Lex N. Lustitia. 2017. 260pp. “Under carefully controlled experimental circumstances, an animal will behave as it damned well pleases.” Price: $2.
Physiolinguistics. P. E. Teetshur. 2003. 98pp. “Originally inspired by the insight that having a ‘very nasal accent’ is associated with poor velum control, which correlates with resistance to putting one’s face in water and difficulty learning to swim, the new field of physiolinguistics seeks to find explanatory statistical correlations between idiolectal and dialectal features and physiological features.” Price: $3.
Blasphology: An Emergent Field of Linguistic Endeavor. Jay Trones. 1997. 666pp. “Breaks blasphemy down using the tools of linguistics. Defines the blaspheme as the smallest unit of blasphemy, and notes that most blasphemes are larger than one morpheme. Covers historical blasphophonetics, the study of meaning-driven sound change to euphemize blasphemes, e.g., Jesus! > Jeez! > geez! > re-analyzed as gee whiz! The chapter on socioblasphology includes looking at humor to euphemize blasphemy, e.g., Jesus H. Christ!, and discusses its effectiveness. Literary blasphology looks at euphemistic language including frak, smeg, and gorram.” Price: $3.
Linguistic Poopology. T. Urdman. 2005. 189pp. “Argues that linguistic production is actually a form of elimination. Speakers keep on taking in input until there is too much, and then they start to eliminate. The reason that people talk more when face-to-face with other people is that their linguistic organ gets filled up more quickly and they need to eliminate more.” Price: 3 clean squares of TP.
Feline x Linguist. Annie Mae. 2010. 58pp (full color). “A recent survey has found that cat food in ceramic bowls is not compatible with placement on a raised surface, such as a linguist’s desk. Concerns of those surveyed include the incidence of loud noises, the presence of flying ceramic shards, and a general increase in entropy. Critics of the survey point to the irreproducibility of the results, and the low number of survey participants (1). Supporters of the survey acknowledge potential problems with the small sample size, but point out that the survey results were unanimous.” Price: $8.
In Defense of Slurvian. Harles Chockett. 1989. 23pp. “Attempts to rebut Hockett’s assertion that ‘Slurvian’ utterances ‘don’t have any phonemic structure’ by highlighting the precise and predictable phonetic detail present in many slurred utterances. For example, but I don’t is reduced to /bʌdʌdoʊ̯n/ which is further ‘slurred’ to [bʌr2õʔ], where [r2] is a trill with exactly two flaps, one for each /d/ in the original utterance, reflecting precisely the phonemic structure of the original.” Price: 50¢.
The Search for Creaky Voice Girl Zero. G. Lottie Frye. 2007. 319pp. “A riveting classic of linguistic epidemiology.” Price: $3̰.9̰9̰.
Adverb Futures: Smartly Improving Your Linguistic Portfolio. Slate Keither. 2004. 119pp. “Rejecting decades of consistent advice that ‘smart linguists will stick to safe investments in core markets, namely verbs and nouns, and that speculation in adjectives, or worse, adverbs, is unwise’, this slim volume suggests that speculative investing in adverb futures is what the truly smart grammarian investor should do.” Price: 1 crypto coin of your choice.
Verboten Tense and Aspect in Wunderlander Deutsch. D. Ooahankt an der Vandt. 1996. 417pp. “What starts as an academic investigation into complex tense and aspect markers in Wunderlander Deutsch—assumed to be related to the use of the Outsider’s hyperdrive—unravels into a real-life politico-scientific thriller as evidence of grammaticalized causality violations and syntactically inverted chronomorphs reveals a secret faster-than-light time travel project.” Price: $6.
Psammeticus Press’s Business of Linguists Series. Senior Editors of Psammeticus Press. 2005–2007. 112pp each. “A short-lived series of professional advice guides from the anonymous Editors of Psammeticus Press. ‘Serious enough to have a colon in the title; not good enough to put our real names on.’ ” Price: $5 or less.
- Lingo Limbo: Surviving Linguistic Liminality
- Jargonitis: Curing Academese with Plain Language
- Extravagant Exclamations: The Allure of Hyperbole
- Incoherent Mumbling: The Art of Conference Presentations
Psammeticus Press Preschool Primers. Junior Editors of Psammeticus Press. 1980–2000. ~25pp each. Price: $1.50 each. Popular titles include:
- Humpty-Dumpty Had a Great Thesis
- Snow White and the Seven Reviewers
- Horton Transcribes a Whom
- Jack and the Colorless Green Beans Talk
- Itsy-Bitsy PIEder
- The Old Woman Who Articulated in a Shoe
- There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fricative
SpecSci Yearbook. Editors of Speculative Scientist. 1919–2020. ~70pp each. Price: 35¢ each. Popular issues include:
- 1972: SpecPhil: “Featuring ‘Improving the Self by Denying its Existence’, which argues that learning to give up your sense of free will and see yourself as a complex cobbled-together collaboration of many different motivations and needs allows you to discover the control levers of your personality, and engineer the right motivation to delay gratification and get the long-term results you desire.”
- 1985: SpecPsych: “Featuring ‘The Goldilocks Framework’, which explains why everyone driving slower than you is a moron, and everyone driving faster is a maniac.”
- 1998: SpecMath: “Featuring ‘Egotistical Statistics’, which explores why it seems reasonable to assume that if you run into someone in the bathroom every time you go, you are allowed to think that they must pee a lot, yet unreasonable for them to think the same of you.”
- 2002: SpecBio: “Featuring ‘A Potential Biological Basis for a Preference for Sons’, which examines the genetic implications of a heritable Y-linked preference for sons, which is almost 100% guaranteed to be passed from father to sons.”
- 2004: SpecStats: “Featuring ‘Making Number Nerds Feel Smart’, a review of the impact of Lavoisier’s famous quote—Statistical reasoning ‘is more complicated and more difficult than one might think. It demands a great sagacity generally above the power of common people.’—on the self-confidence of first-year statistics grad students.”
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