You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato

Did you read the title of that correctly? I know you did! Today’s post is all about words. All about language and some quirks that you may or may not know.

I love words. I love how I can learn new words every single day. I never will run out of learning new words and apparently there are even more new words that are acceptable. According to this CNN article there is now a new Official Scrabble dictionary that has added 5,000 new words including “selfie” and “hashtag”. Now if my Words With Friends games can include those I am in luck!

I love to find little facts and gems that I didn’t know before and that is what today’s post is all about. Maybe you already know some or all of these but maybe, just maybe, you will learn something new today and turn your ordinary day into an extraordinary day!!! Here are some random wordy facts.

On a QWERTY keyboard, 32 % of keystrokes take place on the middle (home) row, 52% on the upper row and a mere 16% on the bottom row. (Jared Diamond, Discover Magazine, April 1997)
Counting up from zero, and excluding the word “and”, the first number to contain the letter A is one thousand. (Prospect Research)
The words “tomato,” “coyote,” “avocado,” and “chocolate” all come from the Aztec language Nahuatl. (Marginal Revolution, February 27, 2006)
In the Eskimo language Inuktitut, there isa single word that means “I should try not to become an alcoholic”—Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga (The New York Sun, December 28, 2006)
“Stewardesses” is the longest word typed with only the left hand and “lollipop” with the right. Urbandictionary.com
There are no words in the English language that rhyme with “orange”, “silver”, “purple” or “month”. (New Scientist, December 18, 2004)
The word “boredom” did not exist in the English language until after 1750. (Boredom, the Literary History of A State of Mind by Patricia M. Spacks)
The word “paradise” comes from a Persian word meaning “walled around”. (Fencing Paradise by Richard Mabey)
The “zip” in “zip code” stands for “zone improvement plan”. (Chicago Tribune, December 2, 2002)
The collective noun for owls is “parliament”. (Wikipedia)
“Queueing” is the only word in the English language with 5 consecutive vowels. (Prospect Research)
The Finnish language has no future tense. (Wikipedia)
There are no plurals in Chinese. (Wired, December 206)
The five most used nouns in the English language are “time,” “person,” “year,” “way,” and “day.” (CNN, June 22, 2006)
The fourteenth most popular search term entered into Google is “Google.” (Time, June 6, 2007)
By the age of five, children have acquired 85% of the language they will have as adults. (John Bastiani, RSA Lecture)
Jack Keroauc typed at one hundred words a minute. (The New Yorker, April 9, 2007)
The condition of being unable to release a dart from one’s hand when throwing is known as dartitis. (Prospect Research)
There are 823 languages spoken inPapua New Guinea, more than any other country in the world. (Limits of Language by Mikael Parkvall