selenography

> It's again, unofficial and unwritten and unstudied American English.

Hm? Where'd you get that impression?

It's certainly unofficial -- English has no official governing body, so essentially _all_ English is unofficial. However, zero-derived denominal verbs are quite common in even formal written English [0], are well studied [1], and aren't at all limited to American English [2].

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[0] As seen in this very thread.

[1] It took me almost no time to find a random academic paper [1a] and two Wikipedia articles [1b][1c].

[1a] https://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~hharley/PDFs/HarleyDenominalV...

[1b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denominal_verb

[1c] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(word_formation)

[2] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/the-pedant-noun...

Sure, if by "now" you mean "at least since Geoffrey Chaucer's time":

> And thys vyce cometh of false hope that he thynketh he thall lyue longe, but that hope fayleth ful ofte.

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Workes_of_Geffray_C... [2] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=false+hope&yea...

Or, come to that, "at least since Cicero's time":

> ...cui legi cum vestra dignitas vehementer adversetur, istius spes falsa et insignis impudentia maxime suffragatur.

[3] https://anastrophe.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/perseus/citequery3.p...

I see this endlessly repeated across the Internet, but it doesn't work. -n't is not a general-purpose clitic the way -'d and -'ve are; it can't attach to arbitrary words. ("Well, Mary'd _said_ she was gonna, and the rest of 'em've all gone home.")

Yes, there are portions of the internet which gleefully misuse it on everything, and sometimes I am part of those portions; but even there, a) it's marked speech, and b) you wouldn't say *Y'all'dn't've gone, you'd say ?Y'all'd've gonen't, and only partially because it's funnier.

> set us all straight.

Se fareblus oni, jam farintus oni. (It definitely won't happen on an echo-change day like today, either. ;))

Contra my comrade's comment, Esperanto orthography is firmly European, and so retains European-style casing distinctions; every sound thus still has two letters -- or at least two codepoints.

(There aren't any eszettesque bigraphs, but that's not saying much.)

Another classic counterexample: "This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand, and God." "This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

The classic, if crude, counterexample: "I helped my uncle Jack off a horse."

(The uncapitalized version doesn't just have different semantics; it has a completely different parse-tree!)

"epicaricacy" fails the simplest test for word-ness: it's never used without an explanation of its meaning. (Nor ever has been, according to Wiktionary.) It seems to have been one of the earliest Nihilartikels.

It could still be adopted as a learnèd (read: pretentious) borrowing from Greek, of course, but in that case it would be spelled epicharicacy.

Isn't that just 442Hz, except about 34.3μs early?