CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
As Selwyn Eagle has said, "Sometimes the most unlikely sources can be the most useful." Also, we recall that "In a sense 'English' is a bit of a fiction. There is no one English, no one monolithic entity with a fixed, unchanging set of linguistic features. Rather, the label 'the English language' is a convenient shorthand for what is a remarkable assortment of different varieties" (Borjars & Burridge, Introducing English Grammar, 2013).