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, 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 all […]
Gander Reveal Party
There’s nothing more fulfilling than releasing an angry male goose in a room full of your closest friends and family
England Could Have Been Sexland
Here, have some history! England was formed by 2 major groups from what is now northern Germany: the Angles, from the Anglia Peninsula; and the Saxons, from Saxony. There were also the Jutes, from what’s now Denmark. The Saxons settled southern England, founding the Kingdoms of Wessex (West-Saxons), Essex (East-Saxons) and Sussex (South-Saxons). The Angles […]
Fantastic False Cognates
False cognates are pairs of words that seem related, but aren’t. Here are some of these amazing linguistic coincidences. What are False Congates? If you read my last post, Dizzying Doublets, you’ll see that sometimes words that seem totally different, like “nation” and “king”, or “gonads” and “genius”, can be distantly related. Words like this, […]
Dizzying Doublets
Have you ever wondered why the word ‘language’ sounds so similar to the word ‘tongue’? Probably not, because those words sound totally different. So you may be surprised to know that both come from the same origin, a word used around 6000 years ago in a language called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). That word was something like […]
Hausos: The Original Dawn Goddess
This is number 2 in a series I’m writing about Proto-Indo-European deities. For part one, click here: Perkwunos: the Original Thunder God The Anglo-Saxon, Lithuanian, Roman, Greek and Hindu dawn goddesses are (probably) all related, and descended from an ancient goddess worshipped 6000 years ago. Hausos: The Proto-Indo-European Dawn Goddess We have no writing or records […]
Linguistic Prescriptivists Make Terrible Zoologists
If you love language, be a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist!Remember:Just because a word isn’t in your dictionary, doesn’t mean it isn’t a word. Just because a dialect is different from the standard language, doesn’t mean it isn’t valid. Just because someone uses a word in a way you aren’t familiar with, doesn’t mean they are wrong.And, however you […]