¹ The use of italics of course is not restricted just to titles posing a potential parsing problem; for the sake of consistency (and thus—perhaps pushing the parallel to language change a bit too far—by analogy, it can be said, to books with cited chapters), this stylistic change is extended to cover all book titles and dissertations even in the absence of the functional motivation of a parsing advantage. The other (functional and societal) motivation of working towards a discipline-wide style is of course well served by this extension.

² Indeed, this very topic has been among the items for discussion at informal gatherings of journal editors at the annual meeting of the LSA the past two years; I would welcome input from any editor in our field on this matter (or related ones), pro or con.

³ I do this even though I was explicitly warned early on in my term as editor, in a letter from a prominent and well-intentioned senior figure congratulating me on my new position and on my first ‘Editor's Department’ column (in Language 78.1, 2002), that I ought not to produce any further such columns as they could well be ‘a virus and a highly dangerous one’, especially if I were to make observations on the field itself! Thus, caveat lector, and, perhaps as well, caveat editor!

⁴ As noted widely, but see, for the record perhaps, the editorial ‘Googling Google’, from the New York Times of Sunday May 2, 2004, where it is noted that ‘a verb made from its [Google's] name has become a part of the lexicon’.

⁵ Morphology and universals in syntactic change: Evidence from Medieval and Modern Greek (Harvard University dissertation, 1978); printed and distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club (1978); published in an expanded and updated version by Garland Publishers (1990).

⁶ Specifically, those consisting of an inflected form of the verb thélo ‘want’ used as an auxiliary-like element marking futurity (and thus meaning ‘will’ in this collocation) together with an inflected ‘main’ verb, for example, thélo gráfo 'I will write* (= will. lsg write. lsg).

⁷ The feature in question is ‘announcements of articles to appear in forthcoming issues’, and is number eight in his list of nine criteria on which he rated journals in this 1984 piece (‘Stalking the perfect journal’. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 2.161-67; note that this feature was abandoned as a criterion for journal perfection in his 1987 follow-up piece, ‘Seven deadly sins in journal publishing’. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3.453-59). While our listing is technically not in the journal but on our website, I am confident that the web listing suffices for fulfilling this desideratum.