If youโre familiar with the story of Robin Hood, youโve probably heard of Nottingham. Likewise, sports fans will recognize Manchester, home of the Manchester United Football Club. While these town names may seem unrelated, they share one thing in common: an English suffix that reveals something about the placeโs history. In fact, many English town and city names [...]
Youโve probably heard the old trope that uncultured people donโt like watching films with subtitles. Or that only seasoned film aficionados can truly enjoy celebrated foreign films like the 1960s Italian classic La Dolce Vita or Japanโs 1954 epic Seven Samurai. Itโs no secret that films made in American English culturally dominate the global film industry, with over [...]
A reflection on โMakerโs Schedule, Managerโs Scheduleโ by Paul Graham, nearly twenty years later We are living in the era of the greatest technological productivity in history. We have tools that generate in seconds what once took days, artificial intelligence assistants available around the clock, and instant access to virtually any information. And yet many people, myself included, [...]
Though you may not recognize the name, youโre almost certainly familiar with it. The NATO Phonetic Alphabet is a historically established set of 26 words, each assigned to a letter of the English alphabet. The purpose of these words is to eliminate confusion when people are trying to spell words aloud over the telephone or radio. The alphabet [...]
If youโve ever seen the Georgian alphabet, you probably noticed that its letters look unlike those of any other language. Its rounded, flowing letters don't resemble Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic, the alphabet used for Russian. These are the scripts most familiar in Europe and the Western world. What makes Georgian stand apart both linguistically and visually among a [...]
For centuries, immigrant communities have significantly influenced mainstream American culture, whether through culinary practices, art, media, and even the American English dialect through vocabulary, pronunciation, and slang. Jewish communities introduced Yiddish words such as "nosh," "schmuck," and "schlep," while Spanish-speaking communities contributed vocabulary related to the landscape and culture of the Southwest and Latin America. At the [...]
Heritage language speakers often move through the world with a quiet contradiction. The language they grow up hearing and using at home feels deeply familiar, yet it rarely fits the categories institutions rely on to define fluency. This mismatch between lived experience and official labels has consequences, shaping how heritage speakers are perceived and how they come to understand [...]
English is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, with over half a billion people using it as their first language and nearly two billion more who consider themselves fluent speakers. This can make it surprisingly easy for Americans to pinpoint a destination where learning a new language isnโt a must. Still, not every country or [...]
The Language of a Uniform Throughout history, uniforms have communicated significant information without words: where a person comes from, what their job is, and even what you are supposed to think when you see them. In the modern day, this type of non-verbal language is highly curated. Rank A personโs rank in the military describes how they relate to [...]
Long before paper archives or digital databases, an empire stretching across the Andes governed millions of people using nothing more than cords and knots. At first glance, a quipu looks unremarkable. But embedded in its strings is a system of memory that challenges what we think language, writing, and record-keeping can be. What a Quipu Is, and What It [...]
