Ron Hardin, who worked at Western Electric in Columbus (I think) at the time, confirms that he is the author: Festoon was mine, chiefly written one Saturday with a tragically flawed copy of Lester's _Introductory Transformational Grammar of English_ bought that morning on a $1 table at Woolworth on my knee. The tragic flaw was that there are severe lexical constraints on language, which is why there are so many made-up words in festoon, to avoid them. The introduction of awful phrases came in reaction to writer's workbench from Lorinda Cherry, which had a real mine of them; and phrases from my boss, S D Hester, who was a wretched writer. People contributed on noticing that. It was greatly helped by troff (``The _pay_ people to write this crap?'' is a typical reaction. Apparently it was not out of the question for Western Electric.) Norman Wilson Toronto ON On the internet, nobody can tell you're whether you're on the internet.