The musical activity didn’t congeal and spread to other cities until the folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s. These hootenannies or hoots exemplified the values and practices of the folk movement. Later, hootenannies often coincided and helped energize political and countercultural events of the 60s …. Hoots could go on for hours and much like hoedowns often included other culturally expressively [sic] rituals, such as dancing, eating, and other community integrative activities.

My to-do list has 300 items, but when my editor asked if I’d like to drink whiskey and write about it for The Wall Street Journal, I figured I could definitely add that to the list. After I learned the whiskey was named Yippee Ki-Yay, I asked if she could get it to me by Saturday because I knew I was heading to our monthly hoot. (That’s short for hootenanny, I guess I should explain.) At the hoot we play and sing old country tunes—two-, three-chord songs almost exclusively.

“Tell me what you saw,” I ventured to suggest. At the question, a veil seemed to fall between us, impalpable but tenebrific. He shook his head morosely and made no reply. The human terror, which perhaps had driven him back toward his normal self, and had made him almost communicative for the nonce, fell away from Amberville. A shadow that was darker than fear, an impenetrable alien umbrage, again submerged him.

The opening was so narrow, I had to turn sideways to squeeze through. Narrow steps led to the top. The low-ceilinged space felt tight, claustrophobic. It smelled damp, and I tasted dust on my tongue. Tenebrific shadows danced on the walls as two brilliant flashes of lightning appeared in the small roof window about six paces to my right. A moment later, the muffled boom of thunder rattled the loose floorboards.

Cornelia Gerhardt, an English linguist at Saarland University in Germany and one of the founders of culinary linguistics, a field concerned with the ties between language and food, believes that English is a language that does not like to pack too much information into one word. “English is analytical, using a series of words to explain an idea,” Dr. Gerhardt said, “unlike polysynthetic languages (where entire concepts are reduced to a single word) or agglutinative languages (where suffixes and prefixes are added to a root word to create new words).”

[F]ully appreciating the challenges of communicating technical information in ASL requires understanding that ASL is not a signed form of English. It’s a distinct language, with specific rules and grammar. When there’s a new phenomenon in English, people tend to create a new word for it. “ASL tends to use agglutinative structure, which means that the signs are composed of different signs, which do not change much when strung together to make a word,” says Jon Henner, a deaf linguist specializing in ASL at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.