What does linguistics have to do with theology? On the surface, at least, not much. If pressed, I might point to the phenomenon of glossolalia, otherwise known as speaking in tongues. And, yes, some linguists are also philologists: if your religion is “of the book,” then there will always be a call for specialists in the languages, scripts, and manuscript traditions of your sacred texts to opine on how exactly to interpret a given word and what some divinity or inspired person intended by one or another turn of phrase.

Surprisingly, there is now a link—brief and barbed—in a volume that Cambridge University Press published in early January: The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature.¹ Over nine hundred pages long, with contributions by twenty-one well-known classicists, the tome “offer[s] provocations for future development” and “recalibrates links with adjoining disciplines.” One of these adjoining disciplines is linguistics.

The paragraph about linguistics in the introduction by the two editors, Roy Gibson and Christopher Whitton, is peculiar. Much of what they write is highly contentious. This is the case even with the quotation they select from the chapter “Latin Literature and Linguistics” by James Clackson, who says that, for linguists, “Individual utterances or texts are of themselves only revealing insofar as they can give information about the language system that produced them.” One reason this is an odd claim is that it is evidently not true for Clackson himself, whose chapter, I should say, is for the