In 1581, using a “shewstone,” or crystal, astrologer John Dee and seer Edward Kelley set out to discover knowledge that couldn’t be gleaned from books or experimentation.

They succeeded: Angels gave them the “Celestial Speech,” the language that God used to create the world and taught to Adam, who lost it in his fall from paradise.

After transmitting the 21-letter alphabet above, Dee said, the angels sent him a series of texts, some with translations, that formed the basis for a vocabulary.

Some features of “Enochian” suggest that Dee was “speaking in tongues” while transcribing the language, while others show suspicious similarities to English grammar and syntax. But then, Dee maintained that modern languages arose through Adam’s attempts to reconstruct the language he had lost.

“No language has a stranger history than the Enochian language,” wrote Australian linguist Donald Laycock, who studied the curious system. “Perhaps strangest of all is that we still do not know whether it is a natural language or an invented language — or whether it is, perhaps, the language of the angels, as its originators believed.”

Nachos are named after a person, Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya, who owned a restaurant known as El Moderno in Piedras Negras, Mexico, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, in the early 1940s. Around 1943 he began serving fried tortilla chips topped with melted cheese and jalapeño peppers, calling the dish “Nacho’s Especiales.”

The taser’s name was inspired by a 1911 adventure book for boys, Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle, involving a rifle that fires electricity rather than bullets. The taser’s inventor, NASA scientist Jack Cover, thought this was an apt description of his own weapon, so he made an acronym of Tom Swift’s Electric Rifle.

Both origins are borne out by the Oxford English Dictionary.

In the early 1970s, Alan Berry and Ronald Morehead visited the Sierra Nevada of eastern California and emerged with “the Sierra Sounds recordings,” 90 minutes of vocalizations and wood knockings that they attributed to Bigfoot. In studying these and other recordings, “Bigfoot language expert” R. Scott Nelson has devised a Sasquatch Phonetic Alphabet to record the utterances:

0:4.5 (W) (W)

0:8.62 (W) (W) (W)

0:15.11 RAM HO BÄ RÜ KHÄ HÜ

0:16.70 WAM VO HÜ KHÖ KHU’

0:17.52 NÖ U PLÄ MEN TI KHU

0:18.82 NÄR LÄ

0:20.21 NA GÖ KÜ STEP GÄ KÜ BLEM

0:21.25 Ü KÜ DZJÄ

0:21.76 FRrÄP E KHÜK LE

(A fuller transcription, and Nelson’s notating conventions, are here.)

What should we make of this? Nelson claims that “the creatures mentally process information at a much higher rate than humans do, or at least they are able to communicate their ideas much faster,” which makes their speech impossible for humans to understand, but “we have verified that these creatures use language, by the human definition of it.”

“No, we haven’t,” answers linguist Karen Stollznow in Language Myths, Mysteries and Magic (2014). “Before creating a transcription of this ‘Bigfoot language’, Nelson first needed to demonstrate that this is language. He has tried to authenticate the recordings, rather than analyze them in an unbiased way. Unknown sounds don’t immediately qualify as ‘language’, any more than an Unidentified Flying Object must be extraterrestrial.”

“There is no solid physical evidence to support the existence of Bigfoot. Before we establish the existence of Bigfoot language, we need to establish the existence of Bigfoot.”

synodite
n. a traveling companion

dépaysé
adj. removed from one’s usual surroundings

credenda
n. things to be believed; matters of faith

David Livingstone reaches the Atlantic, May 31, 1854:

The plains adjacent to Loanda are somewhat elevated and comparatively sterile. On coming across these we first beheld the sea: my companions looked upon the boundless ocean with awe. On describing their feelings afterwards, they remarked that ‘we marched along with our father, believing that what the ancients had always told us was true, that the world has no end; but all at once the world said to us, “I am finished; there is no more of me!”‘ They had always imagined that the world was one extended plain without limit.

(From his Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, 1857.)

The Domestic Names Committee of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names has granted only five possessive apostrophes in 113 years:

• Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., 1933. This had been designated Marthas Vineyard for 40 years until the committee restored the apostrophe after a local protest campaign.
• Ike’s Point, N.J., 1944. Here the apostrophe was allowed because the board agreed that “Ikes Point” would be “unrecognizable.”
• John E’s Pond, R.I., 1963. Spoken aloud, this might otherwise have been misunderstood as “John S Pond.”
• Carlos Elmer’s Joshua View, Ariz., 1995. “Joshua” is the name of a tree and “Carlos Elmer” is the name of a photographer. The Arizona state names board argued that three given names in a row would “dilute the meaning.”
• Clark’s Mountain, Ore., 2002. The Oregon names board asked for this exception “to correspond with the personal preferences of Lewis and Clark.”

Other place names, including Harpers Ferry and Pikes Peak, are generally stripped of their apostrophes in official federal usage (there are some administrative exceptions, such as Prince George’s County, Md.).

The committee argues that an apostrophe implies private ownership of a public place. The United States is the only country with such a policy, but the rule has been reaffirmed five times. In 2013 Jennifer Runyon of the names committee told the Wall Street Journal, “We don’t debate the apostrophe.”

(Thanks, Dave.)

05/24/2017 UPDATE: Apparently New South Wales has a similar rule. From the NSW Addressing User Manual (PDF):

6.7.2.e. An apostrophe mark shall not be included in road names written with a final ‘s’, and the possessive ‘s shall not be included e.g. St Georges Terrace not St George’s Terrace. Apostrophes forming part of an eponymous name shall be included (e.g. O’Connor Road).

(Thanks, Daniel.)