Butt teeth! Butt teeth! Butt teeth!: Bluesky friends I need your most wholesome facts. Science, history, linguistics, literature, etc. Make me go "awww" while I learn something, please.

Bluesky friends I need your most wholesome facts. Science, history, linguistics, literature, etc. Make me go "awww" while I learn something, please.

The word Mamihlapinatapei in the Yaghan language of Tiera del Fuego means "a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that they both desire but which neither one wants to start". It is possibly the most adorkable word in any human language.

you know what, here's my second favorite word: Ubuntu comes from Xhosa, Zulu, and other south African languages, and it is, essentially, a collectivist refutation of Descartes. It has been translated as meaning "A person is a person through other people", or more succinctly, "I am because we are".

my third favorite word is not wholesome

It's also one of the most used & accessible computer operating systems in the world, free & open to all

and the fact that i knew the OS for probably a decade before i knew the philosophy it took its name from feels like colonizer shit, like white people with "tribal" tattoos.

I don't think it's that bad; if they picked that name for gross cynical marketing purposes, it would be. But it's not like they picked it just b/c it sounds cool, like a random Chinese character tattoo. They picked it for its meaning & sharing that philosophy. & it's blatantly an African word.

Yes, that's where they got the name from

I am aware.

another interesting thing imo is how the "xh" is pronounced in xhosa, watch this video - www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHHG...

Incredible Zulu click language - The ultimate tongue twister.www.youtube.com Sakhile has a new channel!! If you like his stuff, please consider subscribing to his channel here: https://youtube.com/channel/UCM2YGltZ7uMB6OzNKLy_V6AI kno...

i had to look up the spelling when writing this post because i forgot how to spell "click"

This reminds me of the Irish "Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine" -- "People live in each other's shadows."

does this imply metaphorically overshadowing others at all, or is it more of a "we stand on the shoulders of giants" kind of implication?

also, as an aside, your beard is incredible.

It's a we're in this together and depend on each othernthing.

Gender in some languages is living/ nonliving things. A rock might be alive if I gender it so. A river is obviously alive. Misgendering a person as dead isn't nice even when they're physically dead.

that's SUPER cool, i love that? any example languages i could look into?

Cree. Which in its modern forms (multiple dialects) has been influenced x400 yrs by French and English. I'm not versed enough to say which others. Cree are the largest First Peoples in Canada. plainscree.algonquianlanguages.ca/grammar/word...

Gender: Animate and Inanimate | plainscree.algonquianlanguages.ca

📌

What we call a "dachshund" or sausage-dog today, was originally in German a "feisthund," or fart-dog, as they are notoriously gassy. Kinda informs your understanding of the adjective "feisty," whence we derive the word.

Dachshund are completely different to Feist (which is like a Jack Russell). Feist are from the UK/US (Fei/yst is old English for fart). In Germany, they're called Mountain Feist. Dachshund was always 'badger dog' in German. & English speakers always pronounce it wrong. Not 'dash-hund' but 'dax-hund'

(Apologies for the TEDtalk. I'm just avoiding work)

Seeing this, and unaware of context, I thought you were discussing more obscure bands along the lines of Can and Amon Duul at first glimpse.

That makes so much sense because my dachshund mix is SO gassy!!!

This is complete nonsense, and feists are not even remotely the same breed as dachshunds.

it's true now

Now we know

she broke the social scene yo

Funny! We house-sat for someone when just married and the house came with a dachshund. It got into my wife's baby bag and ate a small container of vaseline. THAT was a feisty dog for the next few hours.

I always thought feist like the dog breed came from the other meaning of “breaking wind,” like running fast! Are the dogs we now know as feists particularly gassy?

Wait. My dog is a literally “mountain feist.”

paleontologists discovered a type of "dwarf walrus" that was about half the size of the present day version. They nicknamed it the "smallrus" nixillustration.com/tag/smallrus/ not to be confused w/the also adorable smallrus from @tkingfisher.bsky.social www.deviantart.com/ursulav/art/...

smallrus – Nix Illustrationnixillustration.com

I am ahead of my time!

"Squeaky bellow" 💚

Reminds me that the theoretically possible but so-far unobserved “moon of a moon” is called a submoon, or moonmoon en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsate...

Subsatellite - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

i'm sorry you can't just say moonmoon out loud like it's not a summoning spell

Just learned this yesterday - evidently the word "shark" stems from a Dutch word for "villain" or "scoundrel". So loan shark likely *predates* calling the fish a shark, etc. Which means that the fish likely got it's name because folks saw them at sea and said, "Look at those assholes out there"

Sharks are older than trees, as a morphological design. And what's more, fossilized sharks look almost exactly like modern sharks. Which means when you look at a shark, you are looking at a perfectly optimized killing machine. That is the ideal form factor for "ocean dweller".

and speaking of trees... scientists can't even agree what those are knowablemagazine.org/content/arti...

What makes a tree a tree?knowablemagazine.org Despite numerous studies and 30-plus genomes under their belts, scientists are still struggling to nail down the defining traits of these tall, long-lived, woody plants

Oh yes! I've heard about this. Like crabs, "trees" are not actually a specific group of related lifeforms, but just ... a form factor. Some "trees" are no more related to each other than grass is to a tiger lily. The biggest similarity is just lignin (what makes wood tough). & Fun story:

All of the coal that exists on earth is all of the coal that will ever exist, because coal is undigested trees. See, when plants figured out how to make lignin, nothing in nature could actually break it down. For 100 million friggin years. It wasn't until fungus happened upon the enzyme that ...

... A fallen tree would actually now decompose. So, today, trees fall down, they get mushy, then they break down into new dirt. Because of fungus. If it wasn't for fungus, we'd still be filling the earth with the dusty nuggets of long dead trees.

truly, we are in the last days of ancient sunlight

Won't a bog eventually turn into coal at the bottom though? Or does it get to lignite and stop there forever?

"any time you clack a pair of tongs when you pick them up... that's latent carcinization"

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