How Do I Love Thee?, Let Me Draw a Tree Diagram.Alex Savoy.[Author’s Note: Quite in fitting with the approach of Valentine’s Day, I submit this love poem, which, surprisingly, actually worked—though alas I am no longer dating said person anymore, which is why I am bitterly prostituting this former declaration of love, which I have suitably altered for the occasion.] How do I love thee? Let me draw a tree diagram— I was maundering, lonely as a bilabial trill, When I first heard your voice—(some breathy strange tongue), I was love-struck at once—(after all, I was young), How rounded your mouth, And iotally perfect your skin. Your eyes are like geminates, plosive and clear, ... [ more ]
Draw Me a Linguist.Aster E. O’Gnosis and Margo Llicso. Much has been made recently in certain circles of the stereotypical views children have of scientists, and how those views are changed after paying a visit to CERN—all reflected in the drawings of the children. (Drollette, 2010) The cliché says that children are our future, and the humanizing effect of the CERN visit on children’s perceptions may eventually be parlayed into an increase in the number of young people who choose to pursue science as a profession, which of course results in better enrollment in college courses, and thus more funding for science departments. We figured linguistics could probably use some of that action, too. ... [ more ]
SpecGram Archives. A word from our Senior Archivist, Holger Delbrück: While bringing aging media to the web and hence the world is truly a labor of love, SpecGram tries the passion of even the most ardent admirer. Needless to say, we’ve fallen behind schedule. At every turn, the authors found in the pages of this hallowed journal stretch credibility with their gratuitous font mongering—first it was the IPA, then a few non-standard transcription systems, then Greek, and not just the alphabet, but the entire diacritical mess, and now I’ve got some god-forsaken Old Church Slavonic glyph sitting on my desk that no one can even name, and which would give the Unicode Consortium ... [ more ]
Speculative Grammarian and SpecGram.com.Our Story. The august journal Speculative Grammarian has a long, rich, and varied history, weaving an intricate and subtle tapestry from disparate strands of linguistics, philology, history, politics, science, technology, botany, pharmacokinetics, computer science, the mathematics of humor, basket weaving, archery, glass blowing, roller coaster design, and bowling, among numerous other, less obvious fields. SpecGram, as it is known to devotees and sworn enemies alike, has for centuries sought to bring together the greatest yet least understood minds of the time, embedding itself firmly in the cultural and psychological matrix of the global society while ... [ more ]
Ten Years of Linguistic Mischief.by Keith Slater and Trey Jones. The dialectic which is reified as Speculative Grammarian has marked more momentous milestones in its illustrious history than you can shake a stick at, and in this issue we mark the fruitionization of yet another one: the tenth1 anniversary2 of SpecGram’s online publication.3 Prior to; January 2004, linguistic satire languished in predigitalism—the scholarly Scylla and Charybdis that ironically deforested Siberia even though distribution was limited to only the self-appointed Inner Circle. Boldly, a mighty group of giants among the feeble-minded backed by a shadowy and ... [ more ]
Personal Ads for Linguists—including linguists of every kind seeking romance, academic partnerships, and more—all with that special SpecGram twist. N.B.: Information in personal ads is provided by the submitters. The editors and publishers of Speculative Grammarian are not responsible for their content, including, but not limited to, typos, spelling mistakes, poor grammar, bad judgment, factual errors, bald-faced lies, or lapses in national security ... [ more ]
GHOST Grammar.Fang Gui-Ling, Assisted Professor, Mei You College of Cognizable Linguisticity, Macao. In a previous study, I presented incontrovertible evidence that grammatical entities are both ranked and anchored to the relative strength of nodular growths, I think. I argued for the incontrovertible belief that grammar reveals itself through spuriously labelled syntactic nodes, I thought. On second thought, however, it turns out I didn’t. My findings were not false, of course, but my mind/brain had remained in deceitful contemplation of mere trees. This is a requirement that at the time seemed entirely natural in order to express intuitive ideas about grammatical architecture. The present theoretical ... [ more ]
SpecGram, Quarterly.A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief.[Note: Due to a scheduling error 0 and tight deadline, we were unable to cull a small percentage of the Editor-in-Chief’s extensive and extraneous footnotes. Our usual modus operandi is to allow him to annotate and divagate to his tiny black heart’s approximation of contentment, and then mercilessly cut the dead weight with a red pencil-cum-machete. In this case, we were only able to remove and repair the subsequent rhetorical and narrative damage for approximately 86.7% (by weight) of the Editor-in-Chief’s most egregious footnotery. We apologize for the unavoidable ... [ more ]
Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics.by Trey Jones. As a service to our young and impressionable readers who are considering pursuing a career in linguistics, Speculative Grammarian is pleased to provide the following Gedankenexperiment to help you understand the possibilities and consequences of doing so. For our old and bitter readers who are too far along in their careers to have any real hope of changing the eventual outcome, we provide the following as a cruel reminder of what might have been. Let the adventure begin ... [ more ]
Psammeticus Press www.specgram.com/psammeticuspress/, Chiasmus of the Month Awards ... This somewhat irregular award is a sign of our recognition of and deep appreciation for the authors’ contribution to the upholding of decent writing standards in academic literature and to the dissemination of the finest of speech figures. Winners are selected for eachmost many issues by our Chiastic Editor and Editorial Chiasturge. The honorees to date are listed below. Chiasmus of the Month; November 2025, Todd Copeland, 2024, “A Figure of Speech and a Speechless Figure: Determinations of Identity in George Sand’s Indiana and Edith Wharton’s The House of ... [ more ]
Speech Disorders as Indicators of, Potential for Lyrical Success.by Ozzie Tchomzkij, Rock Glossologist to the Stars. In recent decades, there has been a subtle shift in popular music, as the idea that the human voice itself can be considered an instrument, rather than merely a delivery system for lyrics, has gained widespread acceptance among the general public. This has led to the recognition and thus to the success of such singers as Kate Bush, Cyndi Lauper, and Pat Benatar, whose ethereal voices have a purity of tone unmatched among mere mortals. Most singers looking to make a name for themselves, though, do not have the kind of staggering talent that, for example, the divine Kate Bush does. However, those who are ... [ more ]
Linguimericks, Book ६. There once was an X from place B, Who satisfied predicate P, The X did thing A, In an adjective way, Resulting in circumstance C —Anonymous, the Formal Semanticist, In Glaswegian stops oft are heard And young ladies are often called “burd” But across in the East Far from Ayr and Dumfries “Like” is the phrase-final word —Col. O. Nihilist, Polyglots have the cure to it all, Hurry up and become multilingual! It enhances your brain You find jobs with no pain And you’re envied because you are special —Cailín na Luimní There once was a scurrilous gnome Who both near and far took to roam. Woe spread as he’d stroll, Yet he said, ... [ more ]
Exploring Penguin Causatives.Robert F. Scott, London, England, Penguin is a wide-spread language of the Southern Hemisphere, spanning Antarctic waters and southern coastal regions, and reaching as far north as the equator at the Galapagos Islands. Penguin is historically related to an extensive family of languages including Ostrich, Rhea, Emu, and Kiwi, which probably all descended from a common parent language, reconstructed as Proto-Dodo. In this paper, we will examine two interesting aspects of Penguin causatives, in hopes that these will shed light on the nature of causative constructions cross-linguistically. The first area of interest is morphological; the second is semantic. We will begin our ... [ more ]
Poetry Corner.Philologer’s Kvetchwhinge 32. by Athanasious Schadenpoodle Eldsprung, earthbound utterance—grown, articulate, rich, particulate— did frolic, prolix, fore and aft. Now lie, not various (nevermore to harry us), stand patterned, matter’d, flat, and staid: Still. From entities, an identity—if one entangled, sore, a-frayed— of our inquisitions, adpositions be blended, blanded, blunted: Made. O Socio, Socio! Wherefore art thou Socio?. by Thomas Basil Callan Bernstein-Hodson All alone on the fourth floor, Unsure I can take much more. My sense of self come undone— Aware of my many tongues. I observe my sociolect— paradoxic’ly ... [ more ]
Letters to the Editor. Dear Eds, I have a question: Is there a word for a sentence which has no lexical or grammatical errors but makes no sense? I know there’s “nonsense” or “craziness” of course. Is there a linguistic term for it? Or is it outside the realm of linguistics? Rebecca F — Dear Rebecca, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is the canonical example. No single term for the situation seems to exist. “Grammatical-but-nonsensical” is descriptive (of both this type of example and linguistics as a whole, really). “Syntactically correct but semantically ill-formed” is more technical. Either is better than “nonsense” since ... [ more ]
Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part I—Non-Configurational Languages.Phineas Q. Phlogiston, Ph.D. Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn. A. Mathematician Friend1 once told me that, in mathematics, it is sometimes said that if you cannot explain the basic outline of a mathematical idea to a bright and interested 10-year-old, then you don’t really understand it yourself. That got me thinking, and I’ve come to a couple of conclusions: According to my 10-year-old niece, I don’t understand any mathematical ideas. Something similar could be said for linguistic ideas.2 It is generally accepted that math is hard (Davis & Hersh, Friend, Lakoff & ... [ more ]
Man in the Black Box.A Letter from the Managing Editor. One of my great-grandchildren (I honestly forget which one, as there are so many now—three, perhaps four of them, and they descend upon me like a ravening horde) recently purchased a device called an “eye pod” for me. It makes noise; the ravening horde claim it is music, but I detect neither harmony nor melody in the selections that were “preloaded” on it for my “enjoyment”. Through an unfortunate series of button pressings, I have somehow gotten the infernal contraption into such a state that it is only able to render a single “song” entitled “Man in the Box” by an ensemble known as ... [ more ]
A Response to Anonymous’s Collected Graphic Evidence Against the Existence of the Morphome / Knauv Shauling, Ph.D. B.C.E / Assistant Chief Hibernolinguistic Paleocurmudgeon of Speculative Grammarian. I don’t normally feel the need to comment on articles published in Speculative Grammarian. It is my job to edit articles and prepare them for publication, not to referee or comment upon random malarky. However, it is clear that the coward hiding behind the “Anonymous” moniker is a user of a Macintosh--just look at the pointlessly shiny, gaudy globes in the upper left corner of Item 1 of Exhibit A. Further evidence of the disturbing Macintosh mindset is provided by Anonymous’s use of the phrase “Graphic ... [ more ]
Look What The Postman Dragged In.*Editorial note—In the past, Tim Pulju took responsibility for answering all correspondence from our readers, and, as we mentioned previously, apparently took responsibility for writing much of it also. In fact, we’re not entirely sure some of the letters printed in this issue were not in fact written by him, but we can assure the readers that all responses were written by the WLS Publications Committee, a far more respectable body than the former committee of one. Editor: I neither wrote nor submitted the letter attributed to me in Vol. I.2 of your journal. In fact, for all you know, I didn’t even write this one. I am seriously disturbed by the lax standards which ... [ more ]
