First post! This is a site I made that lets you compare the net worth of billionaires and corporations to the GDP of entire countries. Take a look! I want to raise awareness of the scale. There are many people and companies with more wealth than the annual output of nations. Let’s fix it.

This is an interactive I put together of the board and executive overlap between DOW30 companies. It’s incredibly incestuous. And Chevron is its heart I was going to wait to share this because I just shared the global wealth one, but most of these are in freefall today

While we’re at it, other QOL: • change your comment visibility threshold to 0 from 2 • turn on all the in app media players (if you want them) • @graysky.app is a mobile client w keyword mute • 📌 saves the parent comment to this feed (unique to each user) ⬇️ bsky.app/profile/unde... What else?

I just learned this; maybe everyone else already knew, but you can use from:me in search and then whatever terms to find things in your own post feed 🤩 lifesaver

Hey folks! With new people joining, I want to highlight the Bipolar community here. It's been fantastic to have these convos and very helpful to me. This infographic was made with input from the community - just one example! Meanwhile, I'm going to post feeds and call some folks out in comments!

Also! I'm going to launch the paid/nifty bits of the Patreon in the next few days If Patreusers (?) are willing I'd sure appreciate a free follow on it to make me look popular and intelligent and in demand 😆 FR tho, thanks if you can. This layoff culture is murdering me, gotta try something new

Matt Gaetz this week

I don’t think any of us want to be Americans right now, so here’s Canada! It has (or, sadly, had) an enormous variety of first peoples’ languages.

Ever seen a chart of Morse code? It’s really cool! There are some very creative keyboard designs based on this (and other schema) to help people with disabilities communicate more quickly via switch or eye gaze

Survey! What do y’all call it when you stick out your tongue and go like ”thbbbb” at someone? When I was growing up we called that ”blowing a raspberry” but I can’t imagine that’s universal.

Sorry not sorry

This is a very interesting chart of the origins of the word “two,” but whoever made it … well, I don’t know what they were going for really. Fireworks? Enjoy

Probably my favorite book that I own is this one signed by Helen Keller. Since I was posting about orthography last week … check out her handwriting! She was a rad person

one day after Elon Musk said he would start charging all users for X, Bluesky is seeing its biggest single-day in new user signups mashable.com/article/blue...

I’m grumpy this morning so we’re going with the origins of the names of candy. Mmmm candy

Late night is for language memes

India is incredibly linguistically diverse! Here’s some cool maps to illustrate

Fun etymological fact: “gif” was actually an old English word pronounced as /jɪf/ (it later became just “if”). So every time people debate the pronunciation of gif, all I can think of is “yiff” img dot yiff

Speaking of cool alphabets - technically orthography - check out these amazing scripts from West Africa. The area is historically so resource rich that people didn’t have to travel to hunt or trade, so languages evolved in isolation

On the topic of invented languages: the most famous one, Esperanto, has been used for several entire films. One of them is 1966’s “Incubus” starring William Shatner, and I highly recommended it after a few drinks with friends

Last language meme for the weekend… get killing, kids!

Some more weekend fun. My field is augmentative communication so this hits home

She’s right

Weekend etymology memes: late night edition (M for Mature)

Weekends are for language memes

This is my all time favorite piece of short writing. Just beautiful

For a Friday evening, I recommend some words that aren’t real; the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows does a great job nailing down emotions that are hard to describe. Mimomea hits me, but there are plenty of great ones!

For something slightly different: here’s an evolutionary tree of all the major large language models from Word2Vec through GPT-4. Cool! As a computational linguist I’ve worked a few places on that tree …

Honestly “qu” could be one letter

You don't have to say a word to be my friend 🥹

Good morning! I’m thinking about karaoke tonight

nighttime is meme time

Let’s do some maps! Here’s one I like with meanings and geography for a (small) portion of Native American languages Over 40 are known to have been spoken in the Pacific Northwest. The biological diversity allowed tribes to live in isolation; there are more isolates there than anywhere in the world

Unfortunately your friendly neighborhood word nerd here is colorblind. I’m convinced y’all made up most ot these colors. Purple in particular

This apple environmental impact presentation feels like I should be in that ride with the gene mascot at the beginning of Jurassic Park. Satire level corporate cheese

Someone commented about this last week - “chai if by land, tea if by sea.” I think it tells a fascinating story about humans in that era and raises a lot of questions. For example: did the British take so long around the born of Africa that they actually evolved the word? 😂

Someone just sent this to me on another site and I’m compelled to share because I’m hoping the curse it gave me will leap from me to you. I’m so sorry

Some may have seen this defense of trans rights and terminology from Merriam-Webster but it’s worth sharing again. “Oh no! More people to love and more words to learn!” … don’t threaten me with a good time

In honor of poor X, let’s take a moment to recognize some other letters that English has done dirty over the years 🎶 in the arms of the angels

Final funny etymology for the weekend! I like how they went for the concept of this infographic but wouldn’t go all in on “fart” and outright ignored “fellatio”

Everyone please if I could have your attention for a moment, this is important

It you trace the phrase “black lives matter” back to each word’s earliest known root it means approx “to shine, to stick, to mother” 👌🏻 Happy Sunday!

Shhh everyone’s asleep, here’s another language meme

Lest anyone not know the Vedic calendar. I make zero attempt at etymology. Back to pure linguistics tomorrow!

Meanwhile the Vedic calendar is like 🤷

Alright you smartypantses. Riddle me this: where would “curate” go?

And now for something completely different: Worldwide phonetics! Many sounds that aren’t in English are used everywhere else. Here’s the full chart - let’s transcribe some words! I’m open to challenge!

Well since this morning’s map was controversial, let’s talk about nothing

Here’s a bit of a silly one for what I hope is a silly Friday!