The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics

Book excerpt: Speculative Grammarian is the premier schol­arly journal featuring research in the oft ne­glected field of satirical linguistics-and it is now available in book form! The past twenty-five years have witnessed many changes in linguistics, with major de­vel­opments in linguistic theory, significant ex­pansion in language description, and even some progress in getting a few members of the general public to realize that the term "linguist" is not defined as 'someone who works at the UN doing simultaneous trans­lation'. Speculative Grammarian is proud to have been a part of these changes. And now, in our humble yet authoritative opinion, the time is ripe for the appearance of an anthology containing the most important linguistics articles to have appeared in SpecGram in the past twenty-five years. (Readers seeking articles from before 1988 should consult one of the previous volumes in this series, which have appeared at intervals ranging from twenty to one hundred years ever since SpecGram was first published). This anthology, it is hoped, will allow our readers to gain a deeper, wider, fatter un­der­standing of linguistics as it evolved in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, without the trouble of having to take a graduate seminar in "Modern Linguistics" taught by a professor who's so old that she thinks the Beach Boys are cute. Some of us took graduate seminars like that ourselves, and believe us, this book is better.