As I’m sure you’re aware, rivers usually combine together to make larger and larger rivers until they reach the sea.However, there are some exceptions: rivers do sometimes split up and flow in separate directions. These splits are called “bifurcations” (bi” meaning “two”, and “furcations” being the forks). They happen most often when rivers are close […]
Author: Ryan Starkey
“All Lives Matter” Guy Goes on Holiday
Every time I see people saying “All lives matter!”, as if that is some clever comeback to the Black Lives Matter movement, I think about how silly that statement is. It seems to be a way of trying to discredit the movement, that sounds kind of clever and catchy, until you think about it for […]
Dyēus Phter: The Original Sky-Father
The Greek, Roman, Irish, Slavic, Baltic, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Hindu sky-father gods are (probably) all connected, and descended from an ancient sky-father god worshipped 6000 years ago. Okay, maybe “The Original Sky-Father” is a bit of an overstatement. Patriarchal gods of the sky are found in religions all over the world, and humans have probably […]
Reborrowings
Words that were borrowed, and then returned What we call “borrowed words” aren’t really borrowed. When English took the Japanese word “tsunami”, there was no intention to return it. They’re more like “stolen words”. Actually, since the original language keeps them, they might better be labelled “pirated words”. Anyway… in a few cases, the words […]
The difference between Britain, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, and the British Isles
…and how to talk about them without offending people The history of Britain and Ireland is long, complicated and horribly messy, and as a result, lots of people get the words that describe the region mixed up. As well as being inaccurate, misusing these words can cause a lot of offence, so it’s important to […]
Who Brings Presents in Different British regions?
I’ve been getting a lot of confused comments about this post, especially from non-Brits, so I though I should clear it up.Lets start at the bottom and work our way up: Old Nick Yes, in western Cornwall, all gifts are brought by Satan, as a result of a typo in a royal charter in 1338. […]
Rampant Rebracketing
Rebracketing, or as I like to call it, “reb-racketing”, is when words are split in a way that is different from the way they were built. For example, I have rebracketed my my own surname in the logo of this site. I like to think of my name as ⭐🔑, but really, “Starkey” comes from […]
18 Maps of the Developed World That Make America Look Bad
America leads the world in a lot of ways. However, anyone who spends time looking at national demographics and statistics (AKA cool people like me) will have noticed that the USA often stands out when compared to other highly developed nations. I thought it could be interesting to make some maps of the “developed nations” […]
Indo-European Words For Two
Why are all these words related? The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language was spoken around 6000 years ago, somewhere on the border between Europe and Asia. Since then, the language has spread and split up into many different languages in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. Now, nearly half the world speaks an Indo-European language. Because […]
Gander Reveal Party
There’s nothing more fulfilling than releasing an angry male goose in a room full of your closest friends and family