A squib is a brief satirical or witty piece of writing or speech, like a lampoon, or a short, sometimes humorous piece in a newspaper or magazine, used as a filler. It can be intended to ignite thinking and discourse by others on topics of theoretical importance, but is often less substantial than this and just humorous (see The Daily Squib). One of the most famous squibs in English literature is ''The Candidate'' by

Thomas Gray Thomas Gray (26 December 1716 – 30 July 1771) was an English poet, letter-writer, and classics, classical scholar at Cambridge University, being a fellow first of Peterhouse then of Pembroke College, Cambridge, Pembroke College. He is widely ...

. In

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, the term "squib" is used for a very short

scholarly article Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publis ...

; this usage in the field was popularized by John R. “Haj” Ross in the 1960s. A squib may outline anomalous data but not suggest a solution, or develop a minor theoretical argument. A particularly interesting variety of squibs are the so-called snippets, which are "the ideal footnote: a side remark that taken on its own is not worth lengthy development but that needs to be said". The online journal Snippets is dedicated to this type of squib.

References

Linguistics Essays Newspapers {{Lit-genre-stub

See also

References