@BippityBoppityBoo Sorry, I didn’t realize that we were double-posting 
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So it’s not a sweat gland, but it is related? That’s still interesting.
I know that people like to call the French and Indian War/Seven Years War “the First World War because it was fought on N. America and Europe and India. But TIL, by that technicality the Second Northern War aka “Let’s Beat Up Poland Again” also counts, since the Swedes and their Native American allies fought the Dutch, including peg-leg Peter Stuyvesant, in North America.
Not really. A European Spanish (Castilian) and Portuguese speaker will be able to communicate with each other better than speakers of 90% of other distinct-but-related language pairs (e.g. Dutch and German) but it will take a lot of work.
Cite: I have worked with European Spanish and Portuguese people in the same office for many years and that’s what they told me. They can however READ each other’s languages very well. For example they can be forwarded an email in Spanish and not have to translate it before responding. Of course they are helped by having lots of contextual clues and business jargon thrown in. This was ten years ago, before email systems offered translation by default.
And Dutch in Suriname, and English in Guyana, and French in French Guyana.
Slightly more people in South America speak Portuguese than Spanish, I think. And less than 1% combined speak English, Dutch or French as a first language.
In 1932, Hershey went to court to argue that their chocolate counts as food… Chocolate isn’t candy, said Hershey. Candy is made of just sugar, while chocolate also contains milk solids and maybe even fruit and nuts. Chocolate deserved to be taxed at the same rate as regular food.
The case reached the Supreme Court, … and came to the conclusion that candy is a category covering all confectionery, including chocolate, and so chocolate exists separately from regular food.
Not particularly surprising, shoot your shot.
The surprising fact?
Today, many states go by a standard that says if it contains flour, it’s taxed as a food. That means that a Hershey bar is candy. But Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Crème? That’s food. As is Twix, Kit Kat, and even Twizzlers.
A function is its own zeroth derivative. It makes perfect sense, of course, but I had never thought of it like that before [stealth brag] I was learning about kth-degree Taylor polynomials of functions of two variables[/stealth brag] this morning.
I dunno how close Portuguese is to Spanish, but I was really surprised to learn that Portuguese is mutually intelligible with …Romanian.
Wait, what? The mutual intelligibility of Romanian and Portuguese is a LOT lower than Portuguese and Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, Portuguese and Catalan. Probably much lower than Portuguese and French.
I work for a company with operations in and employees from Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and Romanian speaking countries (and Greek, German, Dutch, several Slavic languages, some global projects are a veritable Tower of Babel)
At least in written form Spanish, Portuguese and Italian speakers can figure out short passages with minimal difficulty, e.g. if they need to read a short email or a PowerPoint slide in another language, 90% of the time they will get it no problem. Romanian and French, spoken or written the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese speakers have much, much less comprehension.
I do not speak any of these languages, but an a keen observer of how people interact across language barriers. It’s fascinating.
Sounds about right. More reading here:
Sort of related…
I had to read Gulliver’s Travels long ago. I noticed that all nouns were capitalized, which AIUI is a German thing to this day. And isn’t it interesting to see that weird double s in the Declaration of Independence etc., looking like fs instead? Here’s the detail at the end of spelling for Congress:
In German, apparently this is ß
That sort of thing was a gag in “The Vicar of Dibley”.
There are people with the surname “Straub”, obviously derived from “Strauss”.
No, it appears to be a distinct name with an actual b.
LOL, you both can be right if you’re talking about German Americans because, I’m sure, to many being processed at Ellis Island the Strauß name came out as “Your name is now ‘Straub’. NEXT!”
I know one man named LeCraw because his French immigrant ancestors had Delacroix completely mangled.
I recently learned about päntsdrunk:
Talking of confectionary, since the amount of sugar per TicTac is less than 0.5 grams, FDA labelling requirements permit the Nutrition Facts to state that there are 0 grams of sugar per serving.
TicTacs are 90% sugar.
The word broadcast just came up as a crossword, and the answer turned out to be “sown”. It puzzled me for a bit until I remembered that’s what “sowing” is: broadly casting the seeds about you as you walk along.
This was the original meaning of broadcast, and it goes back at least as far as the 1700s.
This is a fact you recently stumbled across? I’d say almost everyone knows this… Brazil is 48% of the population of South America.
I just looked that up, and I’m still surprised that just shy of HALF of the continent speaks Portuguese!
I learnt this fairly in early high school, with Amstrad 600s and the Logo language. My friend and I hooked up two machines with an RS232 cable - the only one in the entire school, so a big responsibility - to make use of the “beep” function to play music in harmony.
That the the 12th root of two multiplied by 440 Hz (concert A) gives us a semi-tone up to B♭ is one of many utterly useless facts that has stuck around in my head.
With a smattering of French and English thrown in.