A friend asked how Semantic Compositions posts will refer to the author. Specifically, "Will you use a pen name?". Now, names are no small matter to a linguist. Although all labels are arbitrary (more on this later), some labels are more chic than others. "me" and "I" are just so...context-dependent. At the same time, this sort of writing, referring to yourself by the column's name, has always struck me as pretentious (I think this is a convention of Slate's, more than a convention of Judith Shulevitz -- their Chatterbox, Ballotbox, and other X-box columns often do the same -- [X-box? Can you lay off the Microsoft puns for a second? -- ed.]).
Given the unlikelihood of your host coming up with something as topically relevant as, say, Publius was to the Federalist Papers, he will refer to himself as "Semantic Compositions", or, as he becomes a progressively lazier typist, SC. This is, however, a convention that Semantic Compositions will strive to avoid, although the attentive reader will note that SC hasn't taken long to become a total hypocrite (a word which won SC a spelling bee once, long ago).
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