Who will not shudder at the cry "Yog! So-thoth!" ? Even we Lovecraftians still get a proper chill when we read of it or hear Wilbur Whately shout it in a movie. It is probably the most effective of HPL's fictive coinages, seeming to conflate hoary - but at least familiar - aspects of ancient myth with things even more outré, a name of three syllables that by themselves articulate Lovecraft's crucial device of invoking already spooky archaism as a mere pointer to blasphemous mysteries from an even further-removed archaic past. It is linguistically analogous to Lovecraft’s celebrated non-Euclidean geometry: it wasn't designed by human tongues and the human tongue accordingly cannot keep up with it! But "Yog-Sothoth" is already half-familiar to our memory, hinting at the forbidden rites of Nitocris and Im-ho-tep - and far worse!
