juvenescent
adj. becoming youthful

(Peculiar word!)

Jean-François Sudre had a unique thought in 1817: If people of different cultures can appreciate the same music, why not develop music itself into an international language?

The result, which he called Solresol, enlists the seven familiar notes of the solfeggio scale (do, re, mi …) as phonemes in a vocabulary of 2,600 roots. Related words share initial syllables; for example, doremi means “day,” dorefa “week,” doreso “month,” and doredo the concept of time itself. Pleasingly, opposites are indicated simply by reversing a word — fala is “good,” and lafa is “bad.”

Sudre developed this in various media: In addition to a syllable, each note was also assigned a number and a color, so that words could be expressed by knocks, blinking lights, signal flags, or bell strikes as well as music.

“Imagine for a moment a universal language, translatable to colour, melody, writing, touch, hand signals, and endless strings of numbers,” writes author Paul Collins. “Imagine now that this language was taught from birth to be second nature to every speaker, no matter what their primary language. The world would become saturated with hidden meanings. Music would be transformed, with every instrument in the orchestra engaged in simultaneous dialogue. … [T]he beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth seems to talk about ‘Wednesday’ … Needless to say, obsessive fans who already hear secret messages in music would not do their mental stability any favors by learning Solresol.”

Sudre was hailed as a genius in his lifetime, and he collected awards at world exhibitions in Paris and London, but he died before his first grammar was published. An international society promoted the language until about World War I, but in the end it lost adherents to Esperanto, which was considered easier to learn.

Though not having a single written word upon it, this envelope reached me from London without delay. The address reads: Miss Polly Colyer (Collier)-Fergusson (Fir-goose-sun), Ightham Mote, Ivy Hatch, Sevenoaks, Kent. Ightham Mote is indicated by a small sketch of the house itself, which is well known in the county. — Miss Colyer-Fergusson

— Strand, September 1908

A correspondent, name unknown, has sent us the curiously-addressed envelope which we reproduce here. The strange words, we are informed by the Post Office authorities, represent the sounds as made by the key of the modern Morse instrument. ‘Idely iddy’ stand for ‘dots’ and ‘umpty’ for a dash. The envelope reached us as easily as if it had been addressed in the orthodox way.

— Strand, January 1907

quiritation
n. a cry for help

caliginosity
n. darkness

noctivagous
adj. wandering at night

Advance each letter in the word ABJURER 13 places through the alphabet and you get NOWHERE:

anonymuncle
n. a petty, anonymous writer

criticaster
n. a minor or incompetent critic

In Montana Salish, a Native American language of the Pacific Northwest, the word for automobile is p’ip’uyshn — literally, “it has wrinkled feet.”

The Nez Perce word for telephone, cewcew’in’es, means “a thing for whispering.”

The sign for brother in Taiwanese Sign Language is an extended middle finger.

In 1967 University of Chicago linguist Jim McCawley proposed that fuck, when used as an epithet, as in Fuck you, is not a verb, because it accepts none of the adjuncts of a normal sentence:

• I said to fuck you.
• Don’t fuck you.
• Do fuck you.
• Please fuck you.
• Fuck you, won’t you?
• Go fuck you.
• Fuck you or I’ll take away your teddy bear.
• Fuck you and I’ll give you a dollar.

Also, Fuck you “has neither declarative nor interrogative nor imperative meaning; one can neither deny nor answer nor comply with such an utterance.”

What is it, then? McCawley proposed “quasi-verb,” a new category that can be followed by a noun phrase.

The full paper is here; the journal Language credits it with being the first satirical linguistics paper.