Speaking of going fast, a driver was fined €121,000 for speediing. He was doing approximately the equivalent of 50mph in a 30mph zone, which is pretty impolite, but most American police would not lay so heavy a fine, and might even just let him go with a warning. Because, you see, the driver has a rather high income: in Finland, traffic fines are meant to be actually punitive and so are scaled to fit the offender’s wealth, as compared to the US, where a well-to-do miscreant might well be able to talk their way out of a ticket.
I recently discovered that the Welsh word for “carrot” is.. “moron”.
(There’s a Trump joke in there somewhere.)
Technically, “moron” is “carrots.” A single carrot is “moronen.”
There’s a city near my home that’s called “Morón” (etymology unknown), with its corresponding university, the (for Anglo speakers) hilariously named “University of Morón”.
I’m really going to need a cite on that.
It was in all the papers.
To be fair, it wasn’t a very good car, nor very good at flying.
Hardly a car at all. The landing gear was a pair of skids and it was launched from a dolly rolling on a short temporary track initially, then later with a catapult. At the time it was the best airplane available though.
They were limited in the number of flights they could make per day, because every time they wanted to fly it, they had to arrive two hours before takeoff.
Oh, them. I was taking a dip in the ocean when these idiots came along and disturbed all the seabirds. Made a huge mess of the beach. The plane did too. Natives still call them the Wrong Brothers.
I doubt this will be news to anyone here but I just found out octopus’ don’t have tentacles.
Eight arms to hold you.
News to me, for one. And I have made pickled octopus tentacles… uh, arms before.
What does our lord Cthulhu wear around His face? Surely not arms.
(Also this news has ruined, RUINED the genre of “tentacle porn” for me, forever)
Wait, really? Because in older English (closely related to Dutch), the ending -en makes something plural (nowadays mostly only seen in “oxen”, “brethren”, and “children”).
It’s the same in modern High German.
I don’t know much about Welsh, but some quick googling tells me that the -en suffix does a few things. Irritatingly, two of those things is singularizing plural nouns and pluralizing singular nouns.
Yes. In Celtic languages, some nouns are plural by default, and take a singulative ending when you want to talk about just one. You can also pluralize that, so:
sêr = stars
seren = star
serennau = discrete individual stars, like film stars (though you also hear sêr for this)
Reminds me of another case, in modern English: Usually, when you take a verb, and add -er to the end of it, you get a noun meaning a person or thing who does that. But there’s one case where you take a verb, and remove -er from the end, to mean someone or something who does that.
“Pester” and “pest”
In English there are some singular nouns ending with “s” which become plural when you remove the “s”.
(I’m cheating a bit because they become completely different words when the “s” is removed.)
princess → princes
caress → cares
Just now: I found out there’s a Colorado River in Texas.
Trivia question: What state capital is on the Colorado River?
Answer: Austin, TX.