Etymologist

@etymology.bsky.social

415 Followers 53 Following

True but unserious facts about language history every day! unless it’s raining or I’m busy. Blame @coolhand

A map of Canada with the names of each territory explained
A chart of how to encode letters in Morse
A bartender asks a man “which beer would you like;” the man says IPA so the bartender responds wit/ bia wud jur lnik? (IPA)
A chart of evolution of the word “two” visualized as this weird sunflower thing
An inscription reading “to Lila Howard with loving greetings, helen Keller”
An infographic of 20 candy bars with considerable additional text
An exchange on Tumblr: fun fact: the reason that the plural of goose is geese but the plural of moose is not meese is because goose derives from an ancient germanic word undergoing strong declension, in the pattern of foot/feet and tooth/teeth, wherein oo is mutated to ee. however 'moose' is a native american word added to the english lexicon only ~400 years ago, and lacks the etymological reason to be pluralized in that way. Second person: Oh baby. Keep talking dirty to me.
A map of the most commonly spoken native languages in India. There are 40+
A sample of scripts for which there are no Unicode equivalents - apologies
A picture of a goat in a children’s book with the words “get killing” The Swedish word for 'Goat' is 'Get' and the word for 'Kid' is 'Killing' hence this spread from a children's book:
A four panel comic, a man and his dog with this dialog: Alright girl! I got these dog talk buttons! So you can say stuff like walk or park or- 6000 WALK TREAT the OUTSIDE VE RIP SORP @UDE DONG Dude. You. Have. Got. To. Get. Laid. You. Are. Bumming. Me. Out. So. Hard. So after that I just stopped making an effort... You're. A. Good. Guy Hank. You. Just. Need." To. Open. Up. More. eldercactus
Lisa Simpson at a whiteboard with the sentence “before was was was, was was is”
"Zero fucks given" in other languages 6. It's sausage to me (German) 5. I care a cucumber (Spanish) 4. It can oxidize on my anus (Dutch) 3. I slap my balls on it (French) 2. It interests me as much as a kilogram of shit (Finnish) 1. Flowers on my dick and bees all around (Greek)
A chocolate monkey melting in a pot while trying to explain Basque
A family tree of language models; it’s very large but OCR may work to read
Q is too high up in the alphabet. I respect it but it has no place between P and R. Should be at the end with the weirdo/goth letters
One kid : hey do you want to play with me? what's your name? can you hear me? his mother: His name is Boston. He doesn't talk much but he loves to play. Same kid: That's okay! My mom says I can talk enough for two kids!
A graphic showing how karaoke is actually a combination of Japanese and English, which is unusual
slatestarscratchpad The chemical name for vitamin C is *ascorbic acid. I always used to wonder about this one. Is being ascorbic like being acerbic? Is it like being ascetic? Absorbent? Some combination of all of them? Today I learned that scorbiis just a Latinish way of writing scurvy. So a-scorbi-c acid is "no-scurvy acid". runcibility Eat this orange. It's full of FuckScurvium.
A map of Native American languages and their meanings
A very large poster of word origins for the names of colors - I’m sorry I can’t transcribe it all here
A map historic trade routes showing that the leaves traveling by boat tend to be called the English name for name tea
Sonic the hedgehog saying things that are technically true, which I find even more infuriating
MW: 1) saying they don't know what 'genderqueer' means then 2) asking why we added it to the dictionary Douche: @MerriamWebster better get ready to add the 12,000 other sexualities to the list too then MW: We were born ready.
A list of various orthographs and symbols and stuff we’ve used as letters. I want them all back
A bunch of words that derive from the same Latin root
An illustration showing how the German words for shield and toad make turtle
Picture of a classic meme of a dog being like “did u get it”
A chart of each of the words in the phrase Black Lives Matter evolving through German, French, Italian, more French, and prob the French again
Noah looking at all the animals of the ark and pointing at a weird hybrid and saying “what the hell is this.” It’s good but I’m really over family guy
The Vedic calendar, which looks like the eye of Cthulu and I need to go lie down
A wheel of words derived from the PIE root “run”
A chart of every sound the human mouth can make. No really
A map of the origins of the word nothing in different areas of Europe
A map of the history of the word porcupine … this is why we need OCR. There’s simply too much to fit in the alt text