barkable
adj. able to bark

There’s a word for you! Eileen Power’s The Wool Trade in English Medieval History (1941) quotes a 13th-century treatise on estate management:

It profiteth the lord to have discreet shepherds, watchful and kindly, so that the sheep be not tormented by their wrath, but crop their pasture in peace and joyfulness; for it is a token of the shepherd’s kindness if the sheep be not scattered abroad but browse around him in company. Let him provide himself with a good barkable dog and lie nightly with his sheep.

Bonus: hinnible means able to neigh or whinny.

When Frank Bunker Gilbreth needed a name for an elementary motion in the workplace, he called it a therblig — his own name (nearly) backward.

The jazz standard “Airegin,” composed by Sonny Rollins in 1954, is Nigeria spelled backward.

The utopia Erewhon in Samuel Butler’s novel of that name is (nearly) nowhere backward.

In 1963 the Beatles set up a merchandising company called Seltaeb.

A variation in gravitational lensing caused by Earth’s motion is called parallax. A change caused by motion of the source (for example, a binary star) is called xallarap.

The reciprocal of an ohm is a mho.

The reciprocal of a farad is a daraf.

The reciprocal of a henry is a yrneh.

The distant minor planet 20461 Dioretsa orbits the sun with a retrograde motion. Its name is asteroid spelled backward.

In 2011, after attorney Walter Maksym had filed the same complaint three times, federal judge Diane Sykes threw out the case, noting that “[e]ach iteration of the complaint was generally incomprehensible and riddled with errors, making it impossible for the defendants to know what wrongs they were accused of committing.” As an example she cited this passage — a single sentence of 345 words:

That pursuant to the RICO Act, Defendants extortive activities constituted a Pattern of Racketeering activity and conspiracy involving violations of 1956(a)(1)(B)(ii), and 18 U.S.C. § 1341 (wire fraud—the use of interstate mail or wire facilities, here telephone and facsimile transmissions), or the causing of any of those things promoting unlawful activity), and 18 U.S.C. § 1951 (interference with commerce and extortion by using and threatening to use legitimate governmental powers to obtain an illegitimate objectives under color of official right by wrongful plan, extortion, intimidation and threat of force and/or other unlawful consequence and through fear and misuse of there office to obstruct, hinder, interfere with, and/or affect commerce and the use and enjoyment of Plaintiffs’ property and obtaining, as uniformed public officials payment for unwanted services to which they were not entitled by law, attempting to conceal from the United States of America their true and correct income and the nature thereof so obtained from Plaintiffs in order to attempt to evade paying lawful taxes thereon in violation of 26 U.S. § 7201, et. seq., thereby using the governmental powers with which they have been entrusted to gain personal or illegitimate rewards and payments which they knew or should have known were made and/or obtained in return for the colorable official acts as aforesaid, and knowing that the property involved in a financial transaction represents the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity, conducts or attempts to conduct such a financial transaction which in fact involves the proceeds of specified unlawful activity with the intent to promote the carrying on of specified unlawful activity all in violation of RICO and the other laws set forth herein, inter alia, as well as acts chargeable under any of the following provisions of the laws of the State of Illinois 720 ILCS 5/33-3(d) (official misconduct); 720 ILCS 5/1211 (criminal home invasion); 720 ILCS 5/19-4 (criminal trespass to a residence) 720 ILCS 5/19-4); (theft 720 ILCS 5/16 (a)(1)&(2) by knowingly obtaining or exerting unauthorized and/or through threat control over Plaintiff’s property as aforesaid.

Sykes found 23 sentences of 100 words or more in Maksym’s complaint, and added that “much of the writing is little more than gibberish.” Maksym blamed the problems on his recent cancer treatment, saying that he had an “impeccable record.”

See Running On.

Henri Gatien Bertrand, Napoleon’s companion during his exile on Saint Helena, kept an impenetrable diary. The entry for January 20, 1821, reads:

N. so. le mat. en cal: il. déj. bi. se. trv. un peu fat; le so. il est f.g.

It’s not code, just extremely abbreviated French. Interpreter Paul Fleuriot de Langle referred to his work as “translating from French into French — the singular sport and strange pastime.” He rendered the passage above as:

Napoléon sort le matin en calèche. Il déjeune bien, se trouve un peu fatigué; le soir, il est fort gai

Or “Napoleon goes out in the morning in a carriage. He lunches well, finds himself a little tired; in the evening, he is very gay.” Not very incriminating — perhaps Bertrand was just trying to save paper.

(From David Kahn’s The Codebreakers, 1967.)

A pleasing little philosophy puzzle:

If there’s a sentence that’s guaranteed to be false in any context, surely it’s this:

“I am not here now.”

But this very phrase is played on millions of answering machines and voicemail systems every day, and we all understand it to be true. I, here, and now are indexicals, words whose meanings change with the circumstances of their utterance. Here each seems to make a rather uncertain reference, and the resulting sentence on its face cannot be true, yet we all understand it readily. How?

(Jonathan Cohen, “Indexicality and the Puzzle of the Answering Machine,” Journal of Philosophy 110:1 [2013], 5-32.)

Mike Keith composed a short story that’s an anagram of its title:

THE HUMBLE SENIOR PIPER AND A DEPRAVED ENGLISH REDHEAD (REVENGE STORY)

‘He played the bagpipes,’ she moaned, surrendering the drained revolver.

(Dave Morice, “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 33:3 [August 2000], 221-231.)

In any language, the most frequently used word occurs about twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, and so on.

In American English text, the word the occurs most frequently, accounting for nearly 7% of all word occurrences. The second most frequent word, of, accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words, and so on.

This pattern obtains even in non-natural languages like Esperanto. It’s named for American linguist George Kingsley Zipf, who popularized it.

12/24/2021 UPDATE: Apart from languages, the law is observed in measurements of the citations of scientific papers, web hits, copies of books sold, telephone calls, the magnitude of earthquakes, the diameter of moon craters, the intensity of solar flares, the intensity of wars, and the populations of cities. See this paper. (Thanks, Snehal.)