linguistics.md

Not actually linguistics

the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics

• Le monde is one of the examples in French where a word ending with e is masculine. Other examples: homme, livre (if used to mean "book"), mètre.

• "JWT" is pronounced "jot" due to shear difficulty in pronouncing it correctly.

• Upsetti Spaghetti: a way to say "upset", but with more syllables.

• Shea butter is shay butter?

• Classical Latin goes from 100 BC to 200 AD, and it's the good shit if you want to imitate someone who lived during that time. In classical Latin, vowel lengths are critical to understanding what a word means.

• Flouting Grice's maxims in the cooperative principle would be intentionally violating one of the maxims of (quantity, quality, relation, manner) (i.e. depth, truth, relevance, and clarity) in order to convey a different meaning than what was said. For example, by saying vegan tomatoes, you violate the maxim of quantity, and used it to imply that other tomatoes aren't vegan. Or, if you say "my student regularly attends tutorials", you violate the maxim of relation, trying to hint at the student's poor lecture attendance record.

• A rude sound made by sticking out the tongue and blowing is also called a raspberry. See also

• The french "LL" is pronounced "Y" only if it is preceded by an I.

• Agency is the power to do something.

• "Suffering" came from Latin, sufferō (sub- + fero, "under-carry"). "Suffrage" came from Latin, suffragium, which literally means a ballot, but the word root ultimately traces to some nonsense about the knuckle bone.

• Americans put the ending punctuation of a quote, "inside a quote," which makes no sense. Brits put the same thing, "outside the quote".

• "Replace" and "remove" could have meant the same thing at some point in time.

• You are accountable for something, but accountable to someone.

• Samoa is more SA-muah than it is sa-MO-ah.

• Entrepreneur ("undertaker") means someone who takes on work, i.e. someone who does stuff without someone else telling them what to do.

• "Soupy" can mean "lots of clouds".

• "Thy" and "Thine" used to be analogues of "your" and "yours". But sometimes it gets confusing because "thine" is used if the word after "thy" begins with a vowel sound, like "thine eyes".

• Wasabi is phonetically derived from the Chinese words 委佐俾. But they write it as 山葵, which does not sound at all like wasabi. This is because Japanese have a system called 平假名 (hiragana), which... means you read one thing but say another? I am not sure.

• Just like other words that begin with a P, the P in psychologie is pronounced as if there is no special rule for it.

• "MacDonald" means Donald's son. If the child is a daughter, then the last name becomes Nic Donald or similar. O'Donald is the male version of "descendant of Donald"; if you are female in some way, you end up using Ní Donald probably.

• "Milquetoast" means timid. People have come to understand it as "milk toast".

• What a husband does is husbandry: the care, cultivation, and breeding of crops and animals. The word husband meant "homeowner" (hūs- + būandi).

• Baobab is pronounced "bay-oh-bab", but only in English. In other languages, you just say "bao".

• "Dilettante": a person who has an interest, but not commitment or knowledge in something. Like me, collecting useless facts.

• There are three phrases for "I" in Japanese: Watashi (most formal), boKu (general use by men), Ore (informal). "When you get used to Japanese to some degree, be careful with the accent. If you stress Bo, it sounds childish. Always put an accent on Ku."

• The Japanese word for "gallery" is just ギャラリー, or Gyarari. It's fascinating how they manage.

• In contemporary usage, "They" is used to describe something with unspecified gender, while "It" seems to be reserved for objects that have no gender, other than children and pets, for some reason.

• Apparently "sceptic" is the UK spelling of the word "skeptic". The C version came from Latin scepticus, which came from the Greek K version, skeptikós.

• The Irish name Seán becomes Shawn or Shaun. Séan becomes Shane or Shayne.

• Dietitians prefer to be spelled dietitians, but the word was originally dietician so they basically prefer to be wrong (if new is wrong).

• The etymological fallacy: the incorrect assumption that a word always means roughly the same thing as its word root. "Grandfathering" is not a sexist term, even though it was "grandfather" in it.

• A bugbear is an annoyance. Somehow you saw that word twice in one week.

• "Whom should I give this job to" is always wrong, because you would have gone with "To whom should I give this job" if you are trying be use who/whom correctly, or "Who should I give this job to" if you plan to speak informally.

• "The first element in an array" can refer to either array[0] (as in the item that is the first in the array)

• In UK English, "Composite" is always pronounced with the stress on the C. In US English, "comPosite" is always pronounced with the stress on the P.

• "Teeming with" means "full of" or "swarming with".

• Old Chinese is non-tonal, and resembles more like Tibetan than any modern Chinese, including Hokkien, the oldest surviving Chinese language.

• "Baffling" and "Perplexing" have dictionary definitions that reference each other, making them impossible to comprehend (which is the definition of both of these words).

• "Ovoviviparous" Oh-voh-veye-VIP-pa-rous

• Mount Everest, (whose Tibetan name is completely unrelated), was named after George Everest, whose name was pronounced "Eve Rest".

• Apophasis is the term used to describe denying one's own point in an argument: "It would be out of line for me to say that this action would be unwise and unaffordable, sir, as I only care about your best interests."

• Indians invented the word "updation", which could have just been "update", but just like they invented "very less", they traded a simple word for a more complicated one.

• Today's youth hath invented a phrase "cash-money", to be used wherever "cool" or "awesome" serves as an adjective.

• The French word Champignon comes from Latin campāniolus, "grows in the fields". Grass is also a mushroom.

• Since there is no such thing as "informally" charging someone of a crime, to indict someone (formally charging someone) is the exact same as just charging someone.

• That "say when" thing waitors do is informal. Your reply is not necessarily "when", either. Saying OK works just as well.

• "Häagen Dazs" doesn't mean anything. The company was founded in 1960 by a couple of Polish-origin Jews in Bronx.

• In Punjabi, a lakh is called lakkh.

• "Less" has been used with countable nouns before year 1770, at which point a Robert Baker remarked that "fewer" sounded better with countable nouns so should be used in "less"'s place... but he never said others needed to share the same preference. Units of time remains an exception to the fewer vs less rule, and since the US was founded in 1776, it may be forgivable for not following this rule at all.

• The nominative & accusative cases can be thought of as "nominative eats the accusative", or "the main character beats up the secondary character". In the case of German, if a noun is used in the accusative case, and it is "masculine", then the ein becomes einen. See also: how messed up it is.

• A knucklehead is an idiot.

• In "all but forgotten", "all but" means "nearly", literally the opposite meaning of the original phrase. In phrases like "post-COVID consumer spending has all but recovered", just pretend they said nothing. Soon, "literally" will literally mean the opposite of "literally", too.

• 阿媽都唔認得 means 阿媽認唔到你, not 你認唔到阿媽.

• You can almost tell where a Muhammad came from by looking at the spelling. Muhammad is the Arabic one, Mohamed is the Egyptian one, Mohammad is the Persian one, and Muhammed is the Turkish one. Exceptions obviously apply.

• "Preposterous" (pre-posterous) is absurd. "Posterous" (post-erous) isn't anything. "Erous" isn't anything, either. So a "pre-post erous" isn't exactly defined.

• Cortez, from Old French *corteis / curteis, means courteous or polite.

• Capital punishment is called that because "Capital" means "of the head".

• Y in Spanish can sound like Y-, J-, or Sh-, depending on the accent. Alternatively, you can say that the Spanish LL sounds like both of these. "In Spanish, J and Y are allophones (note: I don't think this term was used correctly), meaning that they can be substituted for each other."

• In Quebec, poutine (normally poo-TEEN) becomes POO-tin.

• Less than half of the world's population (40%) speaks only one language, making it more likely for you to bump into a bilingual+ person than one who is not.

• Because we would never say "Me was the winner," neither should we say "The winner was me.". I guess we would never? I mean, I would, but I should never. The winner is I... which makes compound statements also "and I": "The winners were John and I".

• There are no English verbs ending in A.

• According to Grammarly, presume and assume do not have temporal differences, but, rather, presume is to suppose with probability in mind.

• An invalid (noun) is a sickly or disabled person, and a convalescent (con-va-LE-scent) is a person recovering from an illness. These were words used in 1912.

• Zero of something is singular in French. For Russian, because they must ensure crippling alcoholism is carried on by the generations to come, the rules are based purely on the number's ending digit, and dual (2 ~ 4) and plural (5 ~ 9, 0) are different concepts... except 11 (supposedly singular), 12 (supposedly dual), 13 (supposedly dual), and 14 (supposedly dual), which are plurals.

• You can actually add two more words in between 妈 and 逼, i.e. 妈了个逼. It's like "fck your mother's bldy ar" instead of "fck your mother": it tells others how mad you are.

• People pronounce "capsaicin" cap-SAY-ee-sin.

• "Luncheon" is a formal word for lunch. It is unclear which came first.

• The earliest use of "小姐" was in the Song dynasty, referring to prostitutes, "bartenders" (a woman who drinks with you), or exotic dancers. That became "damsel" in the Yuan dynasty. "小姐" may still be used to contextually refer to prostitutes, so you may be forced to use "女士" (educated woman) or "姑娘" (young woman, servant, or a prostitute in a brothel who has yet to receive a customer) instead. There is also "夫人" for when you want to refer to a woman as someone's wife.

• "先生" didn't explicitly refer to men either. Like today, it was used to address people born before you, but unlike today, these people may also be female. In the Qing dynasty, "先生" was used in a book called "文明小史" to refer to, again, prostitutes.

• "Resilience" is considered the standard form of this noun, and many usage authorities consider "resiliency" a useless variant.

• "Senility": how senile you are.

• Oligo- means a few, not monarchs. Oligarchy is where a few people control the country. Monarchy (Mono-archy) is where one person controls the country. Diarchy is also a thing, e.g. where Andorra is ruled by the co-princes appointed by the French president and the Catholic pope.

• Originating from the Nahuatl (read: Aztec) language, the word Axolotl is supposed to be pronounced a-SHO-lok, where the k is actually a t, followed by a click sound.

• In the British pronunciation, the last "i" in "auxiliary" is not pronounced. In the American version, it is.

• Un arbre et une fleur is an example of how irregular the French language is, despite having a giant academy to back it up.

• The French academy does not endorse loanwords like Le weekend, La punch line, and Le chewing gum.

• If "femme" is a woman in French, and French grammar is to be believed, then a "fem" is probably a male woman.

• The Chinese character set was simplified twice, once in 1956 and 1964. Note that the cultural revolution officially started in 1966, and using simplified characters signified that you were a leftist, i.e. a socialist.

• Tenderness is "the quality of a person who cries when they see someone get hurt".

• Welsh is the only de jure (by law) official language in any part of the UK.

• Maori and NZ Sign Language are the only de jure (by law) official languages in New Zealand.

• When writing about yourself, "you" and "I" refer to the same person, but if someone else reads what you wrote, only "I" refers to you, so use the first person.

• Snow peas are called mangetout because the pod is edible.

• Learned can be an adjective (e.g. in "She is a learned woman") describing something as knowledgeable. In this case, it is pronounced LER-ned, and it cannot be spelled "learnt".

• Through the looking glass means the situation is strange and other-worldly.

• Despite having equivalent prefixes, consecrate (to make something sacred) and desecrate (to treat something with violent disrepect) have roughly opposite meanings.

• "No dice" means, or used to mean, that there is no chance of [gambling] conviction if dice cannot be found. No dice, no conviction. Now it means no success when something is attempted, or no service when it is requested.

• "Geese" follow the same proto-Germanic plural convention like feet and teeth, but "Moose" came from Algonquian languages and is therefore not pluralised in any way.

• "Pin" and "Pen" can sound the same in the south.

• Not that many verbs end with S but not with SS. All notable examples are nouns that have since become verbs, for example: gas, bus, bias, canvas. An exception to that is has, which is an edge case to begin with.

• "Busy" sounds like "bizzy" because it was bisig in old English. It used to mean "diligent".

• "Incredible", as its first definition, means "impossible to believe", rather than "wonderful".

• A reader can learn unknown words in context if they achieve 98% comprehension, i.e. not knowing one word in every 50. 80% comprehension (from your own calculations, that's like the top 1500 words) still reads like gibbish.

• Businesses' "New Normal" (financial conditions after the 2008 crisis) came four years before China's New Normal ("新常态"), a term they thought they coined to indicate slowing economic growth.

• The past tense of "sing" could not be "singed" because it was already taken by the past tense of singe, to burn the surface of something. The G is soft.

• "Inmate" just means a resident of a dwelling, but has been adapted to mean especially those who are confined to that dwelling.

• Autoantonyms are words that have two meanings, opposite to each other, such as "original" (new vs old). Homographic homophonic autoantonyms are words that sound the same, look the same, and simultaneously mean two things are oppose each other, such as "dust" (dust a crop vs dust a counter).

• Ton frère is always ton frère, even if the "you" is a female person.

• The kind of press releases that look like something awesome happened, but actually something bad did, is called Spins. "It's been an incredible journey", i.e. "we are closing down now", falls into this category. "New changes to our service", i.e. "we are killing off our service", also falls into this category.

• Sie is more distant German than du (friends, family, young people) for "you". Note that it is not the case that Sie is more formal; it just means the two people are not close enough to use du.

• Poet Lu2 Tong2 (AD 618-907) suggests limiting your tea intake to six cups per session (七碗茶詩).

• Attempto Controlled English ("I dare" in Latin), a subset of standard English that is grammatically formal, was invented by the University of Zurich in 1995, and is still being updated today.

• The British and American do it differently when it comes to quotation marks containing periods, question marks, and exclamation (marks/points). The Americans put periods inside, while British can be either. If anyone is pedantic enough to object to one or the other, claim to be a programmer and put it outside.

• In German, kein/keine seems to be a single word for "not a". Ich bin kein Berliner: I am not a Berliner.

• "It is something we continue to consider" means "stop asking, it's not happening".

• In Dutch, "ij" is a digraph (two letters used together to make one letter), sometimes stylised as a slit U.

• Androgynous means having both male and female characteristics. There is another word for this.

• Traditionally, a noun precedes "(does not?) take place", i.e. "if foo is unavailable, then bar takes (foo's) place".

• "Alphabet" is literally alpha + bet(a), the two first letters of the Greek alphabet (heh), which was the first (?) set to have explicit vowels.

• "To leave no stone unturned" is an idiom that means to do everything possible to find something or to solve a problem (as opposed to a reversi game).

• Prima donna, "first lady", refers to an (Italian) opera's lead female singer.

• Both "fired" and "sacked" came from the carpentry industry. A carpenter to be given the sack is to be told to pack up and leave. To fire a carpenter, you set his tools on fire, making him unable to work.

• Ausgezeichnet (OWS-guh-z-EYE-k-net) means excellent.

• "Making a killing" is deliberately the opposite of "making a living".

• Carpe diem might have meant "reap the enjoyment of the day"; its definition in the context of the poem (by Greek poet Horace) is still contentious.

• 春袋 is not a common term. In a 2014 court case, the judge thought 春袋 referred to the bladder.

• A wild card can also be a person who is allowed to compete in a tournament despite not being qualified for inclusion.

• Most means "the comparatively largest number" if used as "the most", or "more than half of" if not.

• It is almost always correct to say "on the list" rather than "in the list". Notable exceptions are 1] if the word "included" is used, and 2] if you're talking python.

• According to the constitution, Malay is the "national language" of Singapore. Its "official languages" are English, Malay, Chinese, and Tamil, not in that order. In RFC5646, Singapore has a local version of Chinese, but not Malay, English, or Tamil.

• US English speakers believe that the symbol "!" is a point rather than a mark. According to that page, the exclamation mark came from the latin word for joy ("io"), where the I moved above the O, and the O got smaller.

• Coming undone means something (often abstract, e.g. a plan) is falling apart.froma

• Mayday might have come from French m'aider, "help me".

• Sidereal turns out to be pronounced si-DEH-re-oh. It means "relative to the stars". Sidereal time is the time it takes for the Earth to make one rotation relative to the stars (23 hours 56 minutes ish), while Solar time is the time it takes for the Earth to make one rotation and have the sun go to the same place, which takes 4 minutes longer because the Earth rotates around the sun, and the angle it makes is slightly bigger than 360 degrees.

• The "French conditional" mood cannot be used after another "if", so si vous voudriez ("if you would like") is incorrect; you can only say si vous voulez no matter how polite you want to be.

• More Americans speak Spanish as their first language (41M), more than Canada has people, total (37M).

• Learn English, French, and Spanish, and baby you got a world language stew going. To target the most people instead, Hindi and Mandarin might be more useful than French.

• The UK licenses (verb) licences (noun) to people. They don't licence (verb) anything.

• Among four (!) theories why "things" are called 东西 ("east-west") instead of any other thing, such as south-north, there is one that says east-west corresponds to wood and gold, which can be bought; and south-north corresponds to fire and water, which, for some reason, cannot be bought. Another theory is that it's just a shortened version of 东西南北中, which contextually carries a meaning of "everything".

• "Gaang6 du1" is actually 戆大 in Shanghainese.

• Given the word "developer" originates from old French vloper "to wrap", your job is the same as that of a Burrito Boyz employee.

• "Compulsory" is a requirement that came from higher up. Compulsory: the government told you. Mandatory: your company told you. Obligatory: you told yourself. Essential: common sense told you.

• WTF? "Upend" is really "up end"?

• Mandarin came from Portuguese mandarim, from Malay menteri, from Sanskrit mantrin, originally meant an official from the Ming and Qing dynasties.

• Sofort die nötigen Vollmachten ausstellen: "Immediately issue the necessary powers".

• 小器 is the right word. 小气 is the more common, but less correct word.

• "Blammo" is the American "Voila".

• "前凸后翘" refers to a (hot) woman's curvy body.

• Double-edged swords are actually great at cutting things. The saying is a distorted form of "cuts both ways", which is good and bad.

• In the war between "supersede" and "supercede", despite both having been around since the 17th century, "supercede" did not win.

• Paper that has been wet, dried, and now deformed is cockled.

• Unfortunately, "foot fetish" translates to podophilia rather than pedophilia.

• 配 has a "qualification" connotation. 佩 just means "complement".

• Google Translate says "叻沙" is pronounced le4 sha1 in mandarin.

• Concierge actually came from Latin conservus "fellow slave", and refers to the people who take care of a building (like a hotel), not customer service in general.

• "Kopi tiam" and 咖啡店 are the same thing.

• "Bear" just meant "brown", reportedly because the Germans were so scared of saying "ursus", they started saying "the brown one" instead.

• Facsimile (fak-SIM-uh-lee) means an exact copy, not just any imitation.

• 牛逼, cow vagina, means "super cool".

• 馬鹿野郎: bakayaro.

• Detriot is a French word indeed (Détroit, or "strait"). In 1701, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit.

• The stress on "Constantinopole" is actually on the O.

• Some people... use "刀" as if it were "dollar".

• "Of course" is always two words, like "alot" is always one word.

• "Hokkien" (福建) and "Min" (闽南语) (east of 福建) are said to be mutually intelligible. but only to a limited extent with "Teochew" (潮州话) (Southwest of 福建).

• Epiloque is (sort of) Greek for "conclusion ... additional ... word".

• A blouse used to mean a dust coat.

• It would appear that the "terms" in "Terms and conditions" can be singular.

• For some reason, Qu'est-ce que nous faisons ("what do we do") doesn't make sense, so you need to say Qu'est-ce qu'on fait instead.

• The special term 菊花殘 refers to a damaged anus, from either physical wear-and-tear, or from eating spicy foods.

• A junk used to mean a Chinese ship (the touristy ones you see in Hong Kong). They have a high poop, an enclosed superstructure at the stern (rear end) of a ship above the main deck.

• Turns out 诊 has a zh sound, not ch.

• Quebec French is more archaic than French French, like a time capsule that was kept in the 1700s because of its language protectionism... except for some phrases.

• "Buoy" rhymes with GUI in America.

• In Japan, don't acknowledge a sneeze. But if someone sneezed multiple times in succession, perhaps you can say 大丈夫?.

• "Last but one" means "second last". "Last but two" means "third last".

• "Moisten" has a silent T. So does "hasten".

• Hubba hubba means "approval".

• The C in Francois is actually an S?

• Avarice: basically "greed".

• Panzer already means Tank in German, so a Panzer tank is a tank tank.

• The Tironian sign "⁊" was often an abbreviation for "and" in medieval writings. It has nothing to do with why Shift+7 is &.

• The English word "Merchant" came from Latin mercatare, to trade.

• Mottainai! 勿体無い, which means "What a waste!", is the Japanese version of reduce, reuse, recycle.

• Jesus was born in a "manger", aka feeding tub for animals. Manger comes from French manger, to eat.

• "Platform" is uninterestingly plate-forme in French.

• You don't "dig out of a grave". You either dig your own grave, or you get out of it.

• Amateur came from French, meaning "lover of".

• "Turpentine" rhymes with "Nine".

• "Jaywalking" was termed back when "jay" was equivalent to "redneck".

• Sprechen Sie Englisch? is not something you hear at the Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest, because everyone speaks English there.

• 23333333 means "can't stop laughing" because emoticon code 233 was "can't stop laughing" in some chat app.

• 啪啪啪, or just 啪, has come to mean sex. 为爱鼓掌 also means sex.

• Damper is technically more correct than dampener.

• Most Anglo-Saxon names fell out of use after the medieval period, except for Alfred and Edgar, which still exist. Those names are ususally joined by two elements, a prefix and a suffix.

• Tea is called Tea if the product was introduced by sea from Southern China, where it was pronounced te. Tea is called Cha if the product travelled from mainland China by land instead.

• (Die) Traumweber is German for Dreamweaver. There is still a Dreamweaver released in 2018.

• The German word Schiff means "ship" because the High German Consonant Shift changed the sound of the word from "ship" to "shiff" during the 4th or 5th century. Appel also changed some time later to Apfel in a similar shift.

• There is no "hey man" equivalent for older women. For younger women there may be a "hey girl", but "hey madam" is not common.

• "Snide" means derogatory or mocking, but indirectly.

• Yankee might have come from Dutch Janke or Janneke, as New York was New Netherland, a Dutch colony.

• Plaid is pronounced PLAAD because the word came from Scots Gaelic plaide ("blanket"), where ai has just the AH sound.

• A collier is either a necklace or a coal miner, depending on whom you ask. HOWEVER. 咕哩 ("coolie") came from Pekingese 苦力, or "manual labour".

• Funk or Funke is high German for "spark".

• 萌 can be understood as "cute" or "adorable", and 卖萌 màiméng would mean to act cutely.

• The correct spelling for "deli dali" is "dilly-dally".

• The act of abbreviating parts of a word with a number, even if the number starts or ends the word (e.g. w3), produces numeronyms. The act of replacing letters with the same or fewer number of numbers, e.g. (act -> a1t, ed -> e0d), is called trolling. The word "numeronym" is itself abbreviated to n7m.

• The letter T is rarely pronounced. See: "exactly", "often", "soften", "fasten".

• The Hyphen War happened in 1989, when Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia couldn't decide on whether that hyphen should be there. In 1993 they broke up into Czech Republic and Slovakia.

• A question tag / tag question is something like ", haven't you?", ", didn't it?", and ", has it?".

• The Lion City army uses the phrase "You think, I thought, who confirm?" whenever someone says "I think...".

• Back in my days (i.e. the King James Version days) "people" was a singular noun for a group of persons. See this verse for difference.

• Mutiny specifically applies to coups on a ship,

• "Fulfil" is the preferred spelling outside the US.

• Because of the unique way English works, once chamois turns from French into English, it is pronounced "SHAM-mi".

• Soft Gs are usually of romance origin. But you can't explain everything with that rule, like, what about the French word langage?

• Color wasn't converted to Colour until French was favourable (favorable) in 1755, around when the first major English dictionary was made. Samuel Johnson spelled words like that literally because it was cool. Words like center (not centre) are also older spellings used by Shakespeare. The Americans didn't follow suit because a Mr Webster didn't like the French style.

• Jail used to be spelled gaol. "Gaol was the more common spelling between about 1760 and 1830, and is still preferred in proper names in some regions."

• The is in Viscount sounds exactly the same as the is in Island. The word root is latin vice-comes, vice companion, so while "VIS-count" is definitely incorrect, there is no real reason for VHYS-count to be incorrect.

• A limerick has a rhyming structure of (AABBA).

• Weber Straße uses the pronunciation "Weeber" as expected. It sounds like this because Weber means "weaver".

• Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!, the funniest joke in the world, doesn't mean anything to Google Translate.

• German on Duolingo has a rocky start because Sie can mean you, she, or they depending on context. Sie (capitalised) is a "you" for strangers. Sie sind ("you are"), sie haben (they have), sie ist (she is).

• The word gymnasium comes from the Ancient Greek word gymnós meaning "naked".

• Words like "gosh" and "darn" are called minced oaths.

• French has a lot of homophones. /u/--xra's pet theory about the French was "that French people don't actually understand one another. Every word in French sounds just about the same as every other word, so I think they just say what's on their mind and pretend to understand the person they're talking to through gestures."

• "Somewhere along those lines" beats "something along those lines" 2:1.

• Vietnamese diaspora may be secretly talking in Cantonese in a corrupted accent.

• Oh my god, the French pronounce Leroy like le roi, "the king". That's the word origin.

• Bibliotheque, which means "library", is made of biblio- (book) and -theke (place).

• You can't have a noun on its own in French, even if the 'the' isn't actually said | "Hello rabbit" -> "Bonjour le rapin" | "Never leave the baby alone"

• "Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke." -F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Hiragara are a set of characters derived from corrupted Chinese cursive. It is used to write letters. The English equivalent would be the alphabet. Katakana is used more for syllabic spelling of things, such as loan words, technical terms, and company names. The English equivalent would be the IPA. There is also Kanji, literally Han Words, with no English equivalent.

• "Let's go" has an apostrophe because it is possessive. Example: It is Let's go pro.

• Zuckerberg = sugar berg (pile of sugar)

• Doctors saying "stat" is short for statim, "immediately". "Now" is apparently too ambiguous.

• The slimy, dodgy, evasive way politicians speak, where conversations always amount to nothing, is called equivocation typology. "[They equivocate] not necessarily because they are devious, slippery or evasive, but because conflict is endemic to politics, and politicians get asked a lot of questions that cause communicative conflicts."

• Quaff means to drink [alcohol] heartily.

• Auf Wiedersehen literally translates to "To again, see".

• Middle English is between 1150 to 1500, after the Normans invaded.

• High German is spoken in the South and Low German is spoken in the North, because the low and high came from elevation, rather than latitude.

• Le Petit Prince had this phrase in it, Qu'est ce que c'est que cette chose-là?, "what is that thing". It sounds like ke-se-ke-se-ke-se shows la.

• "Quarantine" came from the forty days ships had to wait at the port during the black death.

• German octopodes are always formally masculine, der Krake. Informally, die Krake works as well.

• Slav, as far as it could be traced back, just meant people who speak the same language. So Slovakia means "we speak the same language here", and "Slavic language" means "the language that everyone speaks".

• The bootes constellation turns out to be boötes, bo-O-tees. It means "ox-driver".

• On whether hath and doth were pronounced like has/does, or actually with the th sound: no one is sure, but certain words that end with eth do suggest at least some words that end in th had th pronounced as th. Note that the same page says "There is some evidence that verbs written with this ending in Early Modern English were pronounced as if they ended in -s", so we are back to square one.

• わかりません (wa-KA-RI-MA-SEN) means "I don't know".

• Avoirdupois did indeed come from Avoir du pois, but unlike the translation of "Have some peas" that Google offers, it should come to mean "goods of weight".

• The sad Chinese man character, 囧, meant "window", or "granary".

• Greeks wrote in the manner of boustrophedon, a form of bidirectional text that looks like a worm. The characters are mirrored horizontally as well, but given the greeks only wrote in capital letters and they look mostly alike when flipped, it didn't matter to them.

• Wacom is definitely "waa-komm" instead of "wake'em".

• English follows Latin rules of accent, which require that a penult (next-to-last syllable) must be accented if it contains a long vowel. From that same page about Eureka, the same word in Greek would sound like EW-REK-ka.

• Je m'appelle, literally "I call myself", cannot be literally translated. In French use Je me fais appeler to imply that your real name is different from what people use to call you.

• Ukulele is really oo-koo-leh-leh, in Hawaiian, where the instrument came from. It translates to "jumping flea".

• The root of the word "royal" can be traced back to a reconstructed proto-indo-european word, h₃reǵ-, for "right" or "just".

• One 叮 for microwave, two 叮 s for a tram.

• Germans call their teams "Mannschaft".

• L'occitane should probably be l'ocçitane, "LOC see tan", but has never been.

• The difference between dans and en varies depending on where you are, so it is basically "memorise it".

• You see so many "sorry for my bad english" posts because you can't read comments in other languages. (Though no one says that in Chinese for some reason)

• Sean came from John, but Shawn and Shaun came from German schön (beautiful).

• The stress in "Hespeler" is put on the H.

• Pablum can now be used to describe something that is bland, mushy, unappetizing, or infantile. It is the exact marketing opposite of "Googling".

• Peperoni (pepperoni) can either be peppers, or sausages seasoned with peppers.

• Dykstra is a dutch word for someone who lives by a dyke.

• Habibi is Arabic for darling.

• August can be an adjective. It means "majestic". So you can be august any time of year. If you are James May, then you May be August any time of year.

• "Nemo" means "nobody" in Latin.

• In England-land, "ta" means "thanks".

• French idioms can also be called Gallicisms, the Gaul being where France is.

• There is no reason, other than "but we've always called it that", to pronounce "Lieutenant" with an F. It is possible that the pronunciation came so far back that it came from old French Leuf rather than modern French Lieu.

• Who's to say Leviathan was not Leujathan? Answer: Hebrew.

• Southwark and Suffolk sound just about the same in some accents.

• The word Jewellery came from (Latin, then French) jouel, and has nothing to do with how rich Jewish people are per se.

• You can call nachos Ignacios.

• The term "window-licker" describes a person who would lick a window, i.e. a retard. On the same page, voters from 2007 decided the term "special" was among the top 10 worst words to describe "disabled" people, which, oddly enough, is itself a degoratory term today. There is currently no way to classify mentally challenged people under one term; refer to them as "people with (symptom name)", not "people with (syndrome name)".

• As of today, Google Translate pronounces "rofl" as "are oh eff el", "omg" as "oh em gee", and "lol" as just "lol".

• The French's "space before question mark" rule is actually a space before a symbol with an even number of elements, like ? and !, and no spaces otherwise (like . and ...).

• There are more letters in the IPA for tsk (təsk) than the actual word tsk.

• "Fortnight" came from the Old English of fourteen nights, rather than the modern English version of fourteen nights.

• "Shambolic": chaotic, disorganised, or messed up. Might have come from "shambles".

• If you refer to yourself as "we", e.g. "we need to work together", that's just you thinking as a team. If the queen refers to herself as "we", suddenly that's a case of royal we, or majestic plural, as if she's in a close relationship with God, and talking as a collective.

• ー in Japanese is just the long vowel mark. It has no sound on its own.

• According to the IPA page for French, the em in Temps and ean in Jean sound exactly the same.

• "Vancouver" came from Dutch Van Coevorden, which meant "from the cord ford/crossing".

• Pontius Pilate (the dude responsible for crucifying Jesus) is clearly Pilatos in Greek, but is pronounced like a tiny pie (pie-let) in English.

• "Obligated" is a stronger, more legal/moral version of "obliged".

• Reprehensible means "deserving condemnation". Apprehensible basically means "perceivable". Apprehensive, although somewhat related to apprehensible, means "anxious or fearful that something bad or unpleasant will happen."

• 夠薑, "enough ginger", means "brave".

• India and Pakistan are the world's second and third largest English-speaking populations.

• It is impossible to say "yes, I see him" in French. At least I don't know how to say that, apart from saying "yes, I see it".

• Outside one's wheelhouse: out of one's comfort zone. A wheelhouse is some made-up baseball term with nothing to do with wheels or houses.

• According to this page, Chinese people call it Hong Kong foot, Hong Kong people call it Singapore foot, and Singaporeans call it Manila foot. Therefore, foot fungus came from the Philippines.

• Catholic came from the Greek word for "universal".

• When Julius Caesar was alive, his name was written IVLIVS, because they have neither J, U, nor lower case letters.

• The Japanese loanword for "keyboard" is キーボード, KIBOdo. There's also 鍵盤, but that's empirically less cool.

• Apple (æppel) just means any fruit in general.

• There are no words in Irish for yes and no. See this woman in action.

• Thomas Crapper led to the popularity of the term Crapper. He however did not invent the the flush toilet, nor the word crap, a middle English word.

• More than 2/3 of the US speak English exclusively.

• The Hawaiian language has 5 vowels and 8 consonants. The consonants are roughly equivalent to m, n, p, t/k, h, w, l, and a glottal stop. It does not have sounds: B, C, D, F, G, H, J, R, S, V, Y, and X/Z.

• The French love abbreviating things when speaking. They also love abbreviating things when writing, to the point where undoing the abbreviation is considered wrong.

• Words with accent circonflexe often had an S after the E that has the accent. Intérêt was interest (English kept it), hôpital was hospital (English kept it), and hôtel was hostel (English might or might not have kept it). The pronunciation of a vowel with circumflex is lengthened to compensate for the deleted consonant (in this case, S)... and since it is hardly ever important to emphasis the removal of something, over 2000 words have had the circumflex removed in 2016.

• Fascism (Italian fascismo) came from Italian fascio, or a bundle of rods. Faggot came from the same Latin root.

• Rent also means to be torn apart.

• Celui and ceux are just the masculine equivalent of celle and celles, respectively. They all mean "the one(s)", so they can mean this, that, these, and those.

• Yodelling came from the German term jodeln, "uttering the syllable yo", and originally something they do in the alps to make themselves known.

• "The Spanish R is a skill of the tongue, while the French is all in the throat." (unconfirmed)

• I grec means "The Greek I". Lots of languages call Y the Greek I.

• Both the French and Dutch pronunciations for the Belgian Waterloo consist of an open A.

• "Anyway" is correct, while "Anyways" is not, because of the term adverbial genitive. "Always" beat out "Alway" in the same timeline.

• Carabinieri is the Italian word for police. Carabineer is a soldier who uses a carbine.

• The correct way to write the degoratory term for Pakistanis is 巴基躝癱 ("有香港人將這個俚語與巴基斯坦組合，變成「巴基躝癱」，用作取笑居港的巴基斯坦人，以至所有巴基斯坦籍人士。該俚語帶有嚴重侮辱及種族歧視的成份，情況與香港人叫印度人做「阿差」差不多")

• Most alphabet systems get their order from the Phoenician alphabet, at around 1050 BC.

• Mitt is an abbreviation of mitten. Both can be pluralised.

• [Vietnamese is said to have the highest information density of 1, the benchmark,](information density), while Japanese somehow gets the lowest information density of 0.49, at 7.84 syllables per second, despite being so close to China. English is somewhere in between (0.91, 6.19i/s). If you multiply the two together, you can get the best verbal language for conveying information, which is "pick anything except Japanese".

• "In the Texan dialect, ... up and down are north and south, and out and over are west and east, respectively," claimed John.

• Tonkotsu is pork bone. Tonkatsu is pork cutlet (schnitzel).

• I fail to see why cul de sac can't be "ass of balls".

• "Modem" came from MOdulator-DEModulator. "Codec" came from COder-DECoder.

• There is a buddhist saying "I don't go to hell, who goes to hell"

• The French call tanning "Bronzing".

• Prendre is clearly "take", but prendre le déjeuner means "have lunch".

• 大檸樂 actually means 大撚鑊.

• But according to Shuowen Jiezi, Yam (陰) originally is a geographical syntax which means "North of a hill or south of a body of water"

• "Crochet" is apparently French.

• There is an age beyond which you are unable to learn speech, if you haven't already. Genie the abused child never spoke, even as she lives to be 60. This window also explains why it is so hard to learn a second language after a certain age, perhaps correlating to the individual's reproductive fitness.

• Chop chop came from Cantonese 速速, but multiple sources, including Wikipedia, try to associate it with Cantonese or Mandarin 快快, which no one ever says.

• Rhapsody is actually pronounced RAP-siddy.

• Languages typically develop the word for "red" first (because it's bright?), and then maybe yellow/green, and then blue, and then brown. Read study by Berlin and Key, 1969.

• Walau has the word root of Wa lan eh (我膦呃), my father's (dick).

• The verb for "opinion" is "opine/opining", rhymes with pint.

• "Rothschild" is pronounced "Roth's child". However, being a German surname, it is supposed to be "ROS-shield" instead, and Schwarzchild (black shield) is pronounced "Shh-wat? shield".

• It takes six (full) weeks less for an English speaker to learn French than to learn German.

• "The final straw" came from "the straw that breaks the camel's back".

• Punjabi for Sikh is sikkh "sick". You don't need to say "seek" to pretend you know the difference.

• Americans totally spoke in a lovely accent back in the sixties. It sounds nothing like the rest.

• Schnitzel / Schnipsel: scrap, or a small piece of something. When used on meat, it becomes "cutlet".

• In the first half of your Duolingo French course, you will encounter at least four verbs that start with V: veux (want), voi (see), vis (live), vais (go), and close enough, sais (know).

• Salad was dressed with salt (and vinegar and oil). Word root was salade, something involving salt.

• "Bokeh" from Japanese 暈け is pronounced boke (or ボケ味 boke-aji)..

• In the UK, "Idem"[potence] is pronounced as in Latin, E-dem.

• The Great Vowel Shift turns Multi- from "multee" from "multai". House would really be "hoos" before the GVS. Fun fact: old and middle English are incomprehensible.

• Willkommen becomes Welcome. But (you are) Welcome becomes Bitte schön.

• "Nobody calls (Irish) Gaelic in Ireland. Nobody!" - Horse

• Circadian is actually circa diem, around the day.

• The noun/pronoun cannot be omitted immediately following "and thus".

• ped in pedometer is foot. pedo in pedophilia is child. So pedometer is technically ped-o-meter.

• If there exists an "L Ron Hubbard Science Library", then L Ron Hubbard is the eponym of the library, and the library is the namesake of L Ron Hubbard. Aside: "eponymous" means "gives many names to", and is almost never used in meaningful sentences.

• Réservoir means "storehouse".

• English and French share the same ambiguity for "going" in "I am going to the supermarket" and "I am going to die."

• Weiße is the female version of "Weißer", so it becomes to mean "white woman".

• "Erwin Schrödinger" sounds more like AIR-vin SH-HER-din-er than whatever we have been saying.

• Jupiter is secretly YOO-piter and, Uranus, OOranos.

• "Grasshopper" in French is "criquet". "Cricket" is then called "un grillon".

• Plato unfortunately calls himself Plaaton, rather than "play-doh".

• Oh my god, it's wheelbarrow, not wheel barrel.

• To cant something is to put it at an angle.

• 螄蚶 is pronounced si1 ham1.

• Bean might mean "woman" in Irish.

• If you include some Scottish place names, every letter in English can be silent in one word.

• "Milk toast" is actually milquetoast, a timid person.

• 'Till' is older than 'Until', as it turns out.

• Canary is pronounced kun-NAIR-ree.

• "LL" is pronounced "Y" in Spanish.

• Orion is pronounced oh-RYE-un.

• Albuquerque is pronounced AL-ber-ker-kee.

• There are at least four correct pronunciations for the word "Laos," making it one of the few words no one can pronounce incorrectly. "Locals pronounce it Laos."

• Separate is pronounced SEP-a-rate as a verb and SEP-rate as an adjective.

• Nauru is pronounced na-OO-roo. It means "I go to the beach".

• Maniacal is pronounced "muh-NYE-ic-oh".

• Demonstrative is pronounced "duh-MON-struh-tive".

• Miserly is pronounced "MY-ser-ly".

• Since caliphate is pronounced [kaLEEfa][wikipedia 119], it is never possible to pronounce it correctly.

• Jerusalem is pronounced "yuh Hoo sa LA yim".

• Jojoba is pronounced 'hoHOEba', because reasons.

• Monseigneur (my lord) is pronounced MUN-sin-eur, but monsieur is pronounced MI-si-eur, because [French Academy][wikipedia 169]. Both mean "my lord".

• Ezekiel is pronounced yuh-hez-KEL.

• According to The Hangover, Baklava is pronounced bakLAva. However, everybody else on the Internet says BAKlava.

• Analgesic is pronounced an-alJEEsik, or an-alGEEsik if you are actually Greek.

• Turbo is from Greek τύρβη, "wake", or Latin turbo, "spinning top".

• It is unfortunately wreak (inflict) havoc, not wreck havoc.

• An apologist is a person who argues in favour of a controversial thing, not apologising for it/admitting that it sucks.

• It is homicides, not homocides. Homocides are chemical agents that kill or neuter homosexuals.

• Despondent means the person has no hope.

• Aaron sounds exactly like Erin in US English.

• In French, Gogh is simply pronounced Ror.

• This man here claims chorizo is pronounced Choh-RI-thoh (ch in chop).

• Bánh mì, "餅麵", literally describes a baguette.

• On the other hand, Phở is 𡂄, not 粉.

• Due to the unique way BBC is funded, the latin phrase "Vice Versa" ought to sound more like vichey versa than vise versa.

• Sisyphean is pronounced sisiFEEun.

• Lo, kubernetes is pronounced KOO-ber-nettes.

• Hell, beta is pronounced Betta, so no one is right.

• Hạ Long is derived from 下龍, not the other way around.

• "Alcohol" الكحل meant "fine powder" back in the 18th century. It was then redefined to be any distillate.

• Being a German-Austrian name, Asperger is pronounced ASP-pair-ga.

• Berkshire is pronounced Barkshar, not for a reason.

• Der GM Hummer was named after Hummer, German for lobster. This is a joke.

• Eschewed is really pronounced esCHEWed. No tricks. Not French.

• Socrates, on the other hand, has tricks. SOC-cra-tees, not "So crates".

• In its own language, Austria sounds like OOHS-te-roik or OOHS-te-raik (rolling r).

• This f**ker here says et cetera is pronounced et KETera because Latin has no soft C. "But no one will ever pronounce it that way and you will seem like a pretentious sod if you do." Similarly, because all Latin Vs are pronounced as Ws, "the Vatican" is pronounced the Wat?ican.

• The French must include a space before their question marks.

  "Than-fire-puth-gwin-ges-vulgari-quail-throw-bow-clan-ti-silio-gogo-goch" Llan fair pwll gwyn gyll goger y chwyrn drobwll llan ty silio gogo goch

• The same country that gave us that also gave us "Marlborough" as "moll-bruh".

• The en in Willkommen is completely silent.

• Also, Festhallen is not the festival halls. It's just Festival (or celebration).

• Removal can mean moving furniture. "Removal men" are the moving men.

• Spoonerism refers to comedic switches in the first syllables of two or more words, like "belly jeans".

• Buggery means anal intercourse. "He will be Buggered" means that he will be sodomised.

• "Refrigerator", Refrigerate, from frigerate ("to make cold"), from frigus (cold). The G should have been hard, similar to Refriggurator.

• The long s (ſ) was used where the s is not at the end of a word, or to replace the first s whenever two ss are together. Then people realised the differentiation is uſeleſs, replacing ſ with just s.

• Maple syrup (Sirop d'érable) is similar to Petroleum syrup (Sirop d'Arabie).

• In Hindi, matlab ("it means") is a filler word.

• Adjective for pervert: perverse

• Bagel is from Yiddish: בײגל‎ beygl, in turn from German beugel; pronouncing it BAG-o is incorrect.

• Diaspora should NOT be pronounced die-ASS-pra.

• Chinese and Japanese are not as affected by dyslexia as Arabic.

• I is capitalised only because Chaucer didn't like how i looked when he was writing The Canterbury Tales.

• Like the Turkish word yoğurt, Yogurt has no H. But it is also pronounced YO-sh-t.

• Special subtraction cases in the Romman numeral system occur only if a specific character is repeated four or more times, like "IIII" becomes "IV", "VIIII" becomes "IX", "LXXXX" (90) becomes "XC", and "DCCCC" (900) becomes "CM". There are no other special cases.

• Words that mean both Hello and Goodbye include Ciao, shalom, annyeong, and aloha.

• It is spelled "Feliz Navidad".

• If anyone writes words like naïve, coöperation or reëlect, tell them to sod off.

• Common Errors in English Usage: The Book

• 囧 (like 炯): gwing2

• Luft = air. Waffe = weapon. Luft + Waffe != air weapon.

• Egads came from Ye gods.

• Stress in Icelandic always falls on the first syllable. The only exception is in the word "halló," which usually has stress on the second syllable. Icelandic words never begin with Ð, and no words end with Þ, which are both pronounced like 'th'.

• The cedilla (ç) softens a normally hard C sound that is followed by an A, O, or U.

• Der (masculine thing), die (feminine thing), das (neither of the former).

• I do, thou dost, He/she/it doth.

• "Krieg" just means war.

• Unrelatedly, both Singaporeans and Germans pronounce "Thousand" as "Tausend".

• Say heroin like "huh-ROY-n". People hate that.

• "Es tut mir leid" means "I am sorry". Literally, it translates to "It does me sorry". However, if "sorry" were to be said by itself, it is "Entschuldigung" instead. Because German.

• "Bis Morgen", literally "To morning", is "[see you] tomorrow."

• "ise" are generally verbs, while "ice" are the noun equivalents of those words. (e.g. advice, practice)

• Both "Rosetta" and "Rashid" origiinated from the Coptic (Egyptian) word "Trashit," which was (also) a place name.

• "Chlorophyll" is derived from the Greek words χλωρός, chloros ("green") and φύλλον, phyllon ("leaf")

• The possessives ending in -on (mon, ton, son) are used with masculine nouns: Mon livre means My book. They are also used with feminine nouns starting with a vowel: Mon amie means My girlfriend. Feminine possessives are ma, ta, and sa.

• Lent is from Old English len(c)ten, meaning Spring.

• 'Mischievous'. Fucking seriously IT'S NOT mis-CHEEEEE-vee-us.

• Wikipedia claims that Django was a Romani nickname, meaning "I awake".

• Catholicism is pronounced ka-THO-lic-si-sum.

• Both Chinese and Greek words for kangaroo come to Bag rat, from unrelated roots.

• "Gung ho" is apparently English people's attempt at saying 工合, which is pronounced either Gong he or Gung hap. 工合 is supposed to mean "work" "together", but you can't just glue two words together and make it a sentence.

• "Ho hum" is entirely related to gung ho. Ho hum is an imitation of a yawn from the 1920s.

• "Freund" is friend; "Freud" is joy. They are the same thing.

• The American barbarians say "niche" like they say "nitch".

• Rare (for steak) came from hrere, old English for lightly cooked.

• They call "bokeh" "beau-kay".

• Cortical means "relating to the outside of".

• The use of '-ize' spellings is part of the house style at Oxford University Press; the -ize ending corresponds to the Greek verb endings -izo and –izein. Then, for whatever reason, -ise is now used more in the UK.

• The stress on eczema is always on the first E.

• "Cajones" means drawers. "Cojones" means balls.

• Punjab, in Persian, means "five waters". Land of the five waters. That which is now Pakistan and India (northwest) was conquered by the Persians. Punjabi is the third native language in Canada, and unusual among its language group for being a tonal language.

• Helico-pter means "spiral wings."

• Japanese formal writing ends questions with か rather than '?'

• Cognates are words that have the same origin, e.g. is, ist, est, esti.

• According to Google Translate and Wickerpedia, Nokia is pronounced 'Nokia in Finnish.

• "Celt" ultimately came from Greek Keltoi ("barbarian") and is pronounced with a hard K.

• Adapter may be spelled "adaptor" if you live on an island.1. An English subset called [E-Prime][wikipedia 141] prohibits all variants of the phrase "to be", so as to make the language less ambiguous. This may be useful (see what I did there) for docstrings.

• According to this repo, RSTLNE are not the most common letters. TSNRH are the 5 most popular consonants, and E is the most common vowel. You should pick CDHA, rather than the usual CDMA.

• "In Japanese, replacing s sounds with ch sounds is seen as cute"

• "In spelling sushi, its first letter s is replaced with z when a prefix is attached, as in nigirizushi, due to consonant mutation called rendaku ("sequential voicing") in Japanese."

• Apparently, the sex of an afternoon changes depending on what happens during the afternoon, but the academy says afternoons should stay male regardless of activity, because mornings are males, and there's no reason for males to change into females in the afternoon. Hon hon hon.

• Emaciated means thin and weak.

• The question mark is also called the interrogation mark, whether or not the question is interrogative.

• Connoisseur is spelled connaisseur in French. The connoisseur spelling is traditional.

• "I before E except after C" works around 85% of the time. (done with english-dictionary.json)

• Adjectives are equivalent to "Adnouns".

• "I stand corrected" literally means "I stand wrong"; i.e. I was wrong, I have been corrected.

• Japanese for "pink" is really "pinku".

• "Discombobulate" is a verb that means exactly what it does, namely, to confuse.

• "Kudos" is a singular Greek word.

• Japanese Sign Language for the word "brother" requires you to flip the bird, twice.

• You don't shear a sheep; a sheep gets shorn.

• "靠谱" means reliable.

• Despite being one of the two official languages, only 0.6% of the Macanese population speak Portuguese at home.

• "Improvisation" can be promounced "improvise-A-tion" - but only in British English it seems. Otherwise it is "im-PROV-VI-SA-tion".

• Young swans are known as swanlings or cygnets, from Greek κύκνος, kýknos and from the Latin word cygnus ("swan") and the Old French suffix -et ("little"). An adult male is a cob, from Middle English cobbe (leader of a group); an adult female is a pen.

• The Latin Kyrie, KEAR-ee-ay, came from Greek Κύριε, or "Lord".

• The schoen in Danke schoen rhymes with une.

• Both "bury the lead" and "bury the lede" are used. There is no clear answer.

• Telugu (probably sounds like "Telegoo") is the third most-spoken language in India, behind Hindi and English, which have official status. Telugu is spoken in what is considered South Central, whereas Tamil is the actual South, where the Tamil boyes lived.

• For a tongue twister, try "il y a eu une erreur".

• "How about" is when you have a suggestion. "What about" is when you have a concern.

• The plural of alma mater (nournishing mother) is almae matres (nournishing mothers).

• Ampersand = "and per se, And (the now-removed alphabet)"

• The Greek word "Kyrios" means "lord, Lord, master" in one word.

• In 1984, the thought police removed and reconstructed words from the language to make expressions harder ("freedom") or impossible ("god").

• "Dude" was the term for hipster: an insult towards young men who were overly concerned with keeping up with the latest fashions.

• Level of language proficiency can now be split into A (understand), B (operate), C (communicate).

• "suh dude" just means "what's up dude".

• Yinz is Pittsburghers' unique version of Y'all.

• Legend has it that OK came from "Oll Korrect."

• Italian phonotactics do not usually permit verbs and polysyllabic nouns to end with consonants, excepting poetry and song, so foreign words may receive extra terminal vowel sounds.

• 咁啱嘅，出街呀，食飯未？食咗喇，得閒咪，Call 我囉。伙記呀，碟粉呢？咁耐嘅？未炒就，取消啦！應該就，炒咗喇。再幫你，跟跟啦。跟跟跟，跟條命，唔嚟就，取消啦。我都話，炒緊嚕。你試吓，唔要吖？信唔信，嚦水壺，車你個頭？

• A "costume" is a dress code that reflects class, gender, profession, ethnicity, that sort of thing.

• Pirates don't speak like that. Robert Newton was speaking in Dorset accent, which had the rolled R.

• Check off means Check!

• The Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2015 was 😂.

• "Singapore" sounds more correct in Cantonese ("sing1 ga3 boh1"), which is not their official language, than Mandarin ("xin1 jia1 bo1"), which is their official language.