Jonathan McDowell's Additions to English

I occasionally invent new words. Here are a couple which have gained limited currency (in that at least one other person has used them, even if only to humour me).

MESONAUT, n.:

• 1. (General sense) A person who has made a suborbital flight whose highest point (apogee) was within or beyond the mesosphere, a region of the atmosphere above the stratopause and below the mesopause. The limits of the mesosphere are taken to be 50 to 80 km altitude for definiteness. Joe Walker (1921-1966) became the first mesonaut in March 1961.
• 2. (Restricted sense) A mesonaut in sense (1) who has never flown beyond the mesopause. Thus, "Neil Armstrong was a mesonaut from 1962 to 1966 when, in the course of his Gemini 8 flight, he became an astronaut." As of mid-2004, the only mesonauts in this sense were Milton Thompson (1926-1993) and Mike Melvill (b. 1942?). In a letter to me in the early 1990s, Milt proudly signed himself `NASA Mesonaut'.

FRAVERGY, n.:

• Any quantity labelling the one-parameter family of photon energies. The word was constructed by combining the names frequency, wavelength, and energy; these are all examples of fravergies, as are functions (e.g. logarithms) of any of them. Astronomers tend to use frequencies in the radio domain, wavelengths in the optical domain, and energies in the X-ray domain. Sometimes it is convenient to refer to abstractions of a spectral measurement without specifying whether the photon property being measured is, e.g., frequency or wavelength; fravergy provides that abstraction. Example: "in a photometric measurement, the bandpass can be approximated by a central fravergy, or by a minimum and maximum fravergy, or by a transmission curve as a function of fravergy."