THE DELI COUNTER

  As many of you know, I'm a linguist. As many of you also know, I also live in my own head. It's noisy up here. Before my spiel, I've included the image of what I'm lovingly calling The Language Sphincter so you can see how these different levels of linguistic analysis interact with one another, which will be relevant later on. The inner circles are the smallest units of analysis (at the sound level), and radiate outward to the largest units (at the capital D Discourse level). As you can see, none of these levels of analysis are entirely separate - they all inform and influence one another while still being discrete. For the sake of puzzles, I'm conflating orthography and phonemics, which is...close enough, A for effort, spiel for a different time. With that being said, I've been thinking a lot recently about "crosswordese". Like, what actually is  it? It's obviously not a language or a dialect (and really, where do we even draw the line between