In 1768, Benjamin Franklin proposed a new alphabet, warning that without a phonetic scheme to stabilize spelling and pronunciation, “our writing will become the same with the Chinese as to the difficulty of learning and using it.” He composed this letter as a sample of his idea:
He explains everything (and answers the imagined objections above) in this essay.
Spotted on the r/linguisticshumor subreddit:
Al-longs, ong-fong der lar Part-ree-e-yer,
Ler joor der glwore ait arr-ee-vay.
— Lyrics to La Marseillaise rendered in phonetic French for British soldiers in World War I, from Frank Scudamore’s “Parley Voo”!!, 1915 (via Tony Augarde’s Wordplay, 2011)
In an 1893 textbook, criminologist Hans Gross tells how investigators interpreted this ideograph, which had appeared on the wall of a remote Austrian chapel:
The bird, drawn with a single stroke, represents a parrot, alluding to the great loquacity of the owner of the mark, who was famous housebreaker. The second sign is a church, the third a key. Below, we see three round objects on a line; this, according to the calendar of the Styrian peasantry, is the emblem of St. Stephen, i.e., three stones placed on the ground, alluding to the martyrdom of the Saint by stoning. They here indicate the date, viz., St. Stephen’s Day, 26th December. By the side is an infant in swaddling clothes, this indicates the birth of the Saviour, the date being 25th December. The whole thus means: the owner of the parrot sign intends to break into a church on 26th December. He desires accomplices, and will accordingly be in the neighbourhood of the sign (a lonely chapel in a wood) on 25th December to meet whoever turns up.
“The police, knowing the importance of the signs, took a copy to the Magistrate, a priest helped to interpret the liturgical emblems, and on Christmas day four dangerous criminals were captured near the chapel in the wood.”
In 1641, a syndicate of Puritan clergymen published a pamphlet upholding the Presbyterian theory of the ministry.
They published it under the memorable pseudonym Smectymnuus, an acronym derived from the initials of the five authors: Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstowe.
The Oxford English Dictionary still recognizes the wonderful word Smectymnuan, meaning any of these authors or one who accepted their views.
In a 1962 nightmare, writer Thomas Meehan imagined having to introduce Uta Hagen to Yma Sumac, Ava Gardner, Abba Eban, Oona O’Neill, Ugo Betti, Ona Munson, Ida Lupino, the Aga Khan, Ira Wolfert, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Eva Gabor at a Greenwich Village cocktail party:
“Uta, Yma; Uta, Ava; Uta, Oona; Uta, Ona; Uta, Ida; Uta, Ugo; Uta, Abba; Uta, Ilya; Uta, Ira; Uta, Aga; Uta, Eva.”
Then Polish concert pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski turns up. “‘Come in, Mieczyslaw!’ I cry, with tears in my eyes. ‘I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my whole life!'”
Merriam-Webster points out something I’d never noticed: In many languages, the word for night consists of the word for eight preceded by the letter N:
English: N + eight = Night
German: N + acht = Nacht
French: N + huit = Nuit
Spanish: N + ocho = Noche
Italian: N + otto = Notte
Portuguese: N + oito = Noite
It’s a coincidence. Romance languages derive their words for eight and night from the Latin octo and noctem, and the Germanic languages get them from the Old High German ahto and the Germanic naht. In each case the similarity of the sounds is just happenstance.
(Thanks, Sharon.)
In each of these pairs of nonsense words, which is funnier?
If you’re like most people, you’ll find the first word in each pair funnier than the second. In a 2015 study, University of Alberta psychologist Chris Westbury found that the difference is explained surprisingly well by Shannon entropy, which here measures the unlikelihood of each combination of letters: Outlandish specimens such as yuzz-a-ma-tuzz, oobleck, truffula, and sneetch, all from Dr. Seuss, seem funnier than, say, clester, which might plausibly be a real word. (Schopenhauer had argued that humor results from the violation of expectations.)
“The results show that the bigger the difference in the entropy between the two words, the more likely the subjects were to choose the way we expected them to,” Westbury said. Indeed, the most accurate subject chose correctly 92 percent of the time. “To be able to predict with that level of accuracy is amazing. You hardly ever get that in psychology, where you get to predict what someone will choose 92 percent of the time.”
Interestingly, Westbury had to omit vulgar-sounding nonwords (whong, dongl, shart, focky, clunt) before he even got started — these were so consistently considered funny that they would have interfered with the rest of the examination.
(Chris Westbury, et al., “Telling the World’s Least Funny Jokes: On the Quantification of Humor as Entropy,” Journal of Memory and Language 86 [2016]: 141-156.)
In 1903, Gilbert Woglom of New York composed “The Tramp’s Gratitude,” a musical composition in which the names of the notes, taken successively, spell out a poem:
A bad-faced, faded, aged cad
Begged a feed, a bed, bedad.
Bedded, fed, a café added,
Bed, bag, baggage, egad, cad cabbaged.
The longest English word that can be spelled with musical note names alone is CABBAGE-FACED.
In 1855, the town of Salitpa in southern Alabama applied for a federal post office. The residents had intended to name their community after nearby Satilpa Creek, but in completing the paperwork the applicant mistakenly crossed the L instead of the T. The town has been Salitpa ever since.
05/22/2026 UPDATE: Apparently Kathyrn, Alberta, was supposed to be named Kathryn, after the daughter of local farmer Neil McKay, who had donated the land, but a sign painter misspelled it. (Thanks, Dan.)