Did you know that many languages, like Mandarin Chinese and Finnish, get by perfectly well without a grammatical future tense?…
Long before refrigeration, salt was a mineral so valuable that Roman soldiers were paid in it, giving us the word…
How does someone who cannot form mental images understand a phrase like "a forest of emerald green"? This post explores…
In English, we use optional phrases like "I heard" or "I saw" to show how we know something. But in…
A confession can seem like the most straightforward form of evidence, but the language used to obtain it is incredibly…
Ever felt a conversation was awkward or that someone was being evasive, but couldn't pinpoint why? Philosopher Paul Grice proposed…
The ampersand (&) is more than a simple stand-in for "and"; it's a linguistic fossil with a secret history. This…
Ejectives are a fascinating category of consonants found in languages from the Caucasus to the Americas. Made by building up…
In the 1950s, a fierce debate erupted in Britain over a simple yet profound idea: that your choice of words…
This article explores the world of agglutinative languages like Turkish, Finnish, and Swahili, where long, complex words are built by…
This website uses cookies.