I redefine terminology because I'm the Language Autist and am compelled to rectify names and stand in judgement over the dictionaries and vocabularies of men. Do not misunderstand.

When I was a tutor at a local college, I saw a woman use a calculator for an equation as simple as 2*3=6. It might’ve been 6/2=3 or 6/3=2, I don’t remember exactly.

Incredible that “now” didn’t change pronunciation even slightly for 6,000 years straight, from PIE down to Early Modern English, at which point it got obliterated by the Great Vowel Shift

God, and most of His target audience, aren’t autistic.

when mount tambora in indonesia erupted in 1815, the volcano killed all 10,000 tambora people and wiped out their culture entirely. their extinct language was uniquely non-austronesian & we only know about it from a 48-word vocabulary list collected by colonial officials in 1814

>’Gay' in the derogatory term has no actual meaning other than being generically negative No, calling something gay is not negative, as there is no negation involved.

Every argument ive against unions makes sense from a fairness perspective, and then every once in a while i hear a story like this

Most people don't know this, but Salvador Dalí built his entire career on tapping into his unconscious mind on purpose. Dalí's most famous trick was a micro-nap he called "slumber with a key." He'd sit in a heavy Spanish-style armchair, head tilted back against the leather, both arms hanging completely limp off the armrests, and in his left hand he'd hold a heavy metal key pinched lightly between his thumb and forefinger. Directly under that hand, on the floor, he'd place an upside-down plate. He'd then let himself drift into sleep. The instant he actually fell asleep, his muscles would go slack, the key would slip out of his fingers, hit the upside-down plate, and the clang would jolt him awake. The whole nap was meant to last less than a quarter of a second. He called that half-second window the "taut and invisible wire which separates sleeping from waking," and he'd immediately sketch the hallucinations he saw in that flash. The melting clocks, the elephants on stilts, the burning giraffes, a lot of that came straight out of those quarter-second naps. He picked the trick up from Capuchin monks and wrote it down as one of his "50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship."

Burrowing Owls photographed by Peter G. Arnold

I would continue reading this book if I knew what it was.

I am very proud to announce that Wasaburo Oishi's 1926 report has been fully published for the first time on the open Internet, in its original Esperanto and in a translation I wrote into English! The earliest documentation of the jet stream is now avaliable publicly!

This is actually a massive problem with basically anything in the DSM. It's a perverse inversion of the euphemism treadmill. The meaning becomes so diluted that people lose the ability to describe their experiences, because a different cohort has essentially stolen their words.

Every word of the Roman saying “Homō hominī lupus est,” or “Man is a wolf to man,” was ancient even then. So you could render it into Proto-Indo-European as “Ǵʰm̥mṓ ǵʰm̥néy wĺ̥kʷos h₁ésti,” or Proto-Germanic as “Gumô gumini wulfaz isti.”

really funny linguistic feature here is non-rhoticity causing brits to hallucinate Rs jn phonetic spelling

it's true i can confirm pigeon rizzing is EXACTLY like this 🤭🕊️

We’ve all seen pigeons, but you probably had no idea what their chicks look like. Now you do.

what's the longest possible chain of portmanteau bird names (nonspecific)? like, start with peacock, then peacock-pheasant, pheasant cuckoo, cuckoo-hawk, hawk-cuckoo, cuckooshrike, shrikethrush, thrush nightingale, nightingale-thrush, thrush. is there a strategy?

참신하다

Plus if you use the “compare” feature and line up the birds correctly, there is infinite comedy to be had.

Nigh is an archaic word by now, but we use its comparative and superlative forms all the time: nigh near (more nigh) next (most nigh) These words, especially near, got used as emphases so frequently that they rendered poor nigh obsolete, and now we can also say “nearer”!