Missing English Words
Archeo-linguists reconstruct words in ancient languages that were never written down, by comparing analogous sounds across the descendant languages and extrapolating. I suggest that we can do something similar for currently-spoken languages, and thereby reconstruct the Ideal Platonic English (for example), of which the language we actually use is a mere shadow. The Ideal Platonic English, or IPE, is not a strict superset of Actually Existing English (AEE), in that AEE has many corrupted words that do not appear in the True Language; however, IPE does have many words which are not used in AEE, and which (like dark matter, or Neptune before we knew where it is) can only be found by observing their influence on or analogy with similar words.
I will now give a demonstration of this technique. First we observe the two AEE words "humorous" and "amorous", referring to states of mind; then we note the word "humerus", the long bone in the upper arm. Now, obviously,
humorous:amorous::humerus:amerus
but "amerus" is not a word in Actually Existing English. I propose, however, that it is a word in IPE, and its meaning is not hard to discover. It must be a bone of some sort, and Actually Existing Humans have a "missing bone": The os penis, the penis bone that appears in most primates, but not in modern humans. Clearly then, the 'amerus' refers to the os penis in humans; indeed we can see the same Latin root "amo" that appears in "amorous", and translate "amerus" to "love bone". As further evidence for the missing-bone-missing-word theory, we can note that AEE does have a Germanic-derived word for the amerus, in "boner".
