“Don we now our gay apparel / Troll the ancient Yuletide carol”? I just realized I have no idea what I’m singing. And what exactly is gay apparel? -Kakewalk *** Dear Kakewalk, Pumpkins? In this case “gay apparel” probably just means cheery and colorful. Though if there isn’t already an online Xmas LGBT clothier called […]
Hey Language Nerd, I was waiting for a friend last night, and when I messaged to ask him where he was, he answered “Oscar Mike.” Apparently that meant he was coming, because he got there soon after. But I don’t get it. Do you? -RPD *** Dear Romeo Papa Delta, In fact I do. It’s […]
oh my god language nerd i am learning turkish and it feels like everything is backwards!!!! AM I CRAZY WHYYYYYYYYYYY??? -alimi *** Dear Alimi, You are not crazy, o emphatic person. You are totally correct. Don’t flip, it’ll be okay. Sentences are made of words. Mind-blowing, I know. But the words don’t come in any […]
The sentence which I consider le dernier cri in disjunctive pronouns – with which I, after three years of a Jesuit high school, made an enemy of my public school English teacher: “I have a new puppy; I was given him for Christmas.” I contended that the “I” was an indirect object, and that hence ‘I’ […]
Dear Language Nerd, Today, while making dinner, the topic was raised that the word for cheese in German and Spanish both sound very similar; which is an odd thing for a germanic language and a latin language to share in common. What I found even more odd is that english; which is more or less […]
Dear Biology Nerd, THIS VIDEO WHAT WHAAAAAAAAT -Amelia P. *** Dear Amelia, For those who can’t (or just didn’t) see the video, it’s somebody sprinkling salt on some frog legs, which jump around and enjoy a dance despite having no body to go with. I have a pretty simple biological theory on why this happens. […]
Hey Nerds, what all is in an ambulance? Jemmie *** Jemmie, I am an American paramedic, so my perspective is decidedly American. First, it’s useful to define an ambulance. If you are from a modern country, you probably have an image of a truck with a box on the back, with a siren and lots […]
Hey Art Nerd, I was hanging out at a museum yesterday (yeah, I’m cool) and was wondering why it took so long for drawings of people to actually look like people. There were Egyptian casks, Greek sarcophagi, and Byzantine mosaics, all with flat people with weird eyes and strange poses. The Greek seems really weird, […]
Last post I addressed a question about language complexity, which you can get to here. Today, I’m going straight-up tangent and answering a second, implied question. Here’s the relevant bit: “people from the south (in america) seem to speak slower than people from the north, even though in theory we all speak the same language.” […]
so i read somewhere on the internet that all languages are spoken at the same rate. meaning that even if a language has lots of extra words or really long words, people tend to say them faster so that their sentences take about the same length of time to say as a language with short […]