Things you were shockingly old when you learned

That when people type "whomp whomp" they're referring to Sad Trombone.

Had that revelation in-thread a couple of years ago. It's not shocking though!

Eyeball Kicks, I only learned that when I worked in the produce section of a grocery store. Probably would still not know about the 'i' if I hadn't.

Manhattan had more people living in it in 1910 than today.

https://observer.com/2014/09/manhattan-is-apparently-less-dense-today-than-it-was-in-1910/

― nickn,

Also perhaps surprising to some, Brooklyn has had more people than Manhattan since the 1920s. Queens has had more people than Manhattan since the 1950s.

"Wichita Lineman" isn't about a football player.

Not a fresh one, but I was pretty old:

"Thou" is the familiar form of the second-person singular personal pronoun and "you" the formal one, so that a master would say "thou" to a servant and a servant "you" to a master, not vice versa. I guess I conflated "thou" being archaic with the distinction also being so, plus that in other languages I know, it is rather the familiar version that supplants the formal one.

I learned about a year ago that the "ye" in "ye olde ___ shoppe" was originally just a spelling of "the" and was pronounced the same way.

And the "y" had a dot over it, like a lower case "i" iirc.

And called "thorn."

I learned about a year ago that the "ye" in "ye olde ___ shoppe" was originally just a spelling of "the" and was pronounced the same way.

O RLY

(See below)

They still use it in Icelandic.

It's true that "ye" as in "ye olde shoppe" was and is an abbreviation for "the" and it was never pronounced "yee."

HOWEVER, the second-person pronoun "ye" as in "ye of little faith" is not an abbreviation for "the." It is correctly pronounced "yee."

was originally just a spelling of "the" and was pronounced the same way.

still is!

xp

By the way, slightly irritating to me that Bjork's surname and certain Icelandic footballers' names are spelled and pronounced wrongly - despite the fact that English is one of the few languages shares has the same th- sound(s) as Icelandic.

my boss (who’s Irish) says “ye” meaning “you” all the time. i hadn’t heard it until i started working with him.

really? i see ye instead of you, pretty common in scotland

say even

well I don't really anymore as I live in Canada but among Scottish folk certainly I do

I was going to say you've never had a Scottish boss then, Tracer.

rly! i have scottish friends (mainly glasgow) but never picked up on it from them despite being fascinated by everything else they’d say

well I don't really anymore as I live in Canada but among Scottish folk certainly I do

At least you can still say aboot.

lol

the Canadian about thing is a bit of a misnomer. it's nearer to "a boat". it also isn't really particularly present in western canadian accents, seems primarily an Ontario thing

actually scratch that, it is present in western Canadian accents just not Vancouver, and is present in Atlantic Canadian accents as well so. but definitely "aboat" not "aboot"

The Canadian one I'm obsessed with is 'sorry.'

I never knew about the “sore-ee” until I got to know a couple people who grew up (separately) in Victoria. One had a really pronounced “aboot” but the other two didn’t.

Beastcrawl is really Breastcrawl

https://i.imgur.com/qyqftuc.jpg

That this is a photo of Lauren Bacall and Vice President Truman, taken less than a month after FDR's fourth inauguration.

Man was only VP for only 83 days!

Even in not-great pictures, Bacall is a stunner.

It is interesting that people-who-can't-find-the-ð-and-the-þ-on-their-keyboard roundly spell it Gudmundsdottir instead of Guthmundsdottir

Even google wants to correct me

Is there any purpose to a capital eth (Ð) beyond typing Icelandic in all-caps? Can a word/name begin with Ð?

Thor?

No, hold on I'm getting my eths and thorns mixed up.

Þor. Thorn is a hard "th", eth is a soft "th" and would seem to always follow a vowel-- Höðr, i.e

xp

In Icelandic, ð represents a voiced dental fricative [ð], which is the same as the th in English that, but it never appears as the first letter of a word, where þ is used in its stead. The name of the letter is pronounced in isolation (and before words beginning with a voiceless consonant) as [ɛθ̠] and therefore with a voiceless rather than voiced fricative.

So that's that, then

A completely useless upper-case letter

It is interesting that people-who-can't-find-the-ð-and-the-þ-on-their-keyboard

tbf this was standardised in the 1980s; if the subs and typesetters at music papers started looking for their ð keys and slugs at the time, the issue would be 1,662 weeks late by now and we would all have to be listening to Hipsway and Hue & Cry

Is everyone learning Icelandic all of the sudden?

a bit of homework:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp0sim1RVfI

Hmph.

If 80s kids like me had to correctly style Mötley Crüe, Motörhead, and Hüsker Dü, you pansies can deal with the occasional þ or ð.

We had no computers so we had to get our shit done with typewriters and hot metal and linotrons and photo-offset.

Uphill, both ways, in the snow, beeyotches.

TIL = Today I Learned

Excellent meta-TILing

Swag stands for “stuff we all get” – thanks NYT crossword

Wait! I misread the clue, that’s not true. NEVER MIND ITS BEEN A WEEK

^classic example of a backronym

it took an emoji-filled tweet to tip me off that Herbert Hoover's VP had Native American ancestry:

History of US Vice Presidents:

👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏼👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👩🏾

— Sarah DEMOCRACY IS BACK Parcak (@indyfromspace) November 7, 2020

Born on January 25, 1860, in Topeka, Kansas Territory, before its admission as a state in January 1861, Charles Curtis had roughly ​3/8 Native American ancestry and ​5/8 European American. His mother, Ellen Papin (also spelled Pappan), was Kaw, Osage, Potawatomi, and French. His father, Orren Curtis, was of English, Scots, and Welsh ancestry. On his mother's side, Curtis was a descendant of chief White Plume of the Kaw Nation and chief Pawhuska of the Osage.

people keep failing to mention that she is also the first not-bald VP

it's a red letter day for the haired

Saw a similar meme that had a fly on Pence