#lmao literally fuck you all
- The word “trump” actually comes from the family name “Trump”: one of The Donald’s ancestors was so successful in real estate that his name became a verb.
- The click languages of Africa were recently proven not to exist, when several of their alleged speakers admitted that their grandfathers made them up as pranks in the 1930s and said that they were tired of keeping up the joke. However, click languages do exist: Chinese actually has several dozen clicks. Its speakers just don’t use them where foreigners might hear, because they’re worried about sounding uncivilized.
- It’s a common misconception that English is descended from Latin. It’s actually Uralic! Compare ‘water’ to Finnish vete-‘water’, ‘hack’ to hakea‘retrieve’, ‘boy’ to poika‘boy’, the archaic second-person singular verb ending -(e)thto the Finnish second-person singular verb ending -t, etc.
- It’s not a coincidence that “theology” starts with “the”. Before the Christianization of Europe, the English were pantheists, so naturally they called everything a god. The Christian missionaries didn’t stop them because they actually only spoke Old Gutnish, a closely related Germanic dialect that got its name from having ‘Gut’ (cf. German ‘Gott’) rather than ‘The’ as its word for ‘god’, and thought ‘the’ was just the definite article. This is also where the English word ‘god’ comes from.
Some more:
5. Everyone knows that the word “Apron” used to be “Napron,” but the -n got switched to the indefinite article “a.” What most people don’t know is that happened with “Apple” too. It used to be “Napple” because they originally came from Naples.
6. Spanish was invented when Italians vacationing in Iberia got drunk and started slurring Italian to some of the native tribes there who picked up the language.
7. The haircut “Mullet” comes from the French verb “Mouler” meaning “mould,” because the original wearers of the haircut would spend long hours “moulding” their haircut to make it look just right.
8. Maryland is the only state with a state motto in Italian because of the little reported Tuscan naval invasion of the colony. This is evidenced from the name “Annapolis,” which comes not from the wife of Lord Baltimore, but from Anna de’ Medici the Archduchess of Austria and sister of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
