history
The modern English dictionary is a strange kind of artifact. It contains roughly 250,000 entries, each with a definition, etymology, pronunciation guide, and usage examples. It is treated as authoritative for spelling and meaning, consulted in legal disputes, used to settle bar arguments, and assumed to be a basically
mathematics
The most common word in any language is roughly twice as frequent as the second most common, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. The pattern holds across languages and centuries. Why it does is one of the deepest unsolved questions in linguistics.
culture
On the Canary island of La Gomera, two shepherds can hold a conversation across a kilometer of ravine using nothing but whistled syllables. They are not communicating in code. They are speaking Spanish, transposed from vowels and consonants into pitches and articulations the human mouth can hol
language
Half the languages spoken today will be gone by 2100. The mechanism is not war or genocide for most of them; it is intergenerational transmission failure under economic pressure. The pattern is consistent enough that linguists can predict which languages are doomed and which can
language
Counting feels universal, but the words and grammars we count with are anything but. The shapes of number across languages reveal that arithmetic was invented many times, in many ways, by people who did not need most of it.
history
The comma is six hundred years older than the dictionary. The question mark might come from a medieval scribe's shorthand for the word 'questio.' Here is the strange history of the marks we use without thinking.