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March 30, 2022

You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato

8 Comments/ 109/ 1

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 am a word nerd. 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 Wordle 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
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8 Comments

Leave a comment
  1. jena c. henry
    March 30, 2022 at 08:11 am

    Wow! Each nugget was fascinating. Amazing that by 5 we have acquired most of our language. And good luck with your Wordle today!

    Reply
  2. Dianna
    March 30, 2022 at 08:22 am

    I, too, am a word nerd! (Loving Wordle every evening! And practicing at will on the Wordle 6-letter) I may have commented this before, but when Marshall was taking keyboarding in high school, we had a game for finding the longest word typed with one hand. His dad and I owned the local Ben Franklin at the time, and I happened to walk by a set of drinking glasses and saw “Beverageware”: that was our longest one!

    Reply
  3. Mama's Empty Nest
    March 30, 2022 at 08:51 am

    From one word nerd to another, I enjoyed these facts you found and shared with us.

    Reply
  4. Darlene
    March 30, 2022 at 09:52 am

    Some amazing facts. I love words too and enjoy looking up where they originated (Etymology). The English language is made up of many other languages which I think is wonderful. I have always loved a parliament of owls.

    Reply
  5. Susi
    March 30, 2022 at 10:36 am

    I love language and learning about languages. Once upon a time I even studied linguistics and the history of languages is fascinating. Thanks for sharing!!!

    Reply
  6. Minnesota Prairie Roots
    March 30, 2022 at 11:27 am

    Those are a lot of facts I did not previously know. My class for the day.

    Reply
  7. Shirley Matthews Dunn
    March 30, 2022 at 04:47 pm

    Lots of facts I did not know thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  8. Priscilla King
    April 05, 2022 at 11:01 am

    Some fresh, some familiar…I know the tune, and think I have all the words printed somewhere. You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to, let’s call the whole thing off. Apparently in some times and places it was a big status difference. I don’t think it is now. I’ve heard British people say to-mah-to but never an American of any age or socioeconomic stratum, except as a joke. I wonder if anyone else has heard this, though.

    Reply

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