dog whistle
n.— «The spot, which has no obvious reason to exist, is like a secret signal, a dog whistle blown on the thirtysomething frequency. Come back, MTV beckons, in a language it hasn’t spoken in years.» —“Has Mtv Sharpened Its Edge?” by Russell Smith Dallas Morning News Apr. 9, 1989. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...