Happy Friday, Horde! I come bearing procrastination.
It is currently 32C (apparently 90 in freedom units) in my corner of England, which may not seem like a particular lot until you realise that British homes were designed to capture all of the heat and carefully preserve it for future generations. You could say I’m a little OVER the weather (see what I did there? There’s no point in groaning, I’ll never stop).
While outside has been cancelled, I thought I would share a few of my favourite tiny internet rabbit holes for anyone who is joining me indoors.
Merriam-Webster Time Traveler
Pick a year. Any year! And Merriam-Webster will show you words whose first known use in print dates from that year.
Is it nerdy? Yes. Is it also Devouring Hordey? You bet your TBR!
I naturally started with my birth year, and then immediately got derailed clicking through all of them to check my linguistic assumptions. Tell you what, finding out I’m younger than the first record of the word assless feels destiny-defining somehow.
Please report back in the comments with the word that surprised you most, I want to know all the good ones.
School Myths
This website cheerfully informs us that “facts expire”, and then lists which pieces of our hard-won education have been debunked since we graduated (aka the adults LIED to us. I’m especially watching you, Mrs Sofronie who taught me biology. It’s on sight!)
You can, again, put in the year you graduated, or browse by subject if you don’t fancy surrendering your vintage to the internet.
For me it was the four-taste tongue map, the concept of learning styles, and quite a few spider facts which have apparently been quietly escorted from the premises. I fell into a research hole so deep I had to fight a Balrog on the way out.
Internet Artifacts
An interactive little museum of internet history, starting back in the primordial ooze (ARPANET) and wandering through things like the first spam email, the first emoticon, the beginning of memes and other assorted relics of the early web like the Ask Jeeves homepage.
This one is particularly dangerous if you are old enough to remember that connecting to the internet had a specific noise:
What are your favourite nerdy, fascinating, beautifully pointless corners of the internet? Share your rabbit holes with the Horde!
Artifact Friday!
Indy First! 😀
First?
I can give you second. But it’s Friday, so it’s a special second!
I can’t remember which college in the US puts this out every year. But at the start of every Fall Semester they publish a list to their professors (and the public) of what the incoming college freshmen did not grow up with.
Example – my nephews & sons did not know/interact with: VHS, TVs without a remote control, dial turn phones (duh) 4 digit local calling, etc.
If the BDH would like to do a Google search and break your brains on what you, your kids and grandkids (not there yet thank Goddess) missed out on in childhood – don’t break your brain! 🙂
I was born the year of the first use of: pissing contest and pimpmobile.
I don’t know what to do with that.
No, I totally get you. Like it feels important in some way, just not immediately actionable 😀
We must trust that there will be a time when it will come in handy!
hamster dance 🐹
What is fun is to look at the “Teachers lied to me” and go back and see how many of them are totally wrong, mostly wrong (tongue map) and “now has a different interpretation” (learning styles) The fact checking on these things is really bad. Some of this can be ascribed to new theories, but nobody has disproven the old theory. Some of it is simplification, teaching the theory of gravity is still a good idea, even though it has been disproven.
I find it “mind-boggling” that the term was birthed the same year I was in our dark adjectival past!!! Knowing that “Televangelists” emerged to the public at the same time I emerged from American Public Education system may keep me awake………
Murphy and I were born in the same year! No wonder we’re kindred spirits. I also got garam masala, tai chi, blast from the past, and hallucinogen. Interesting! Also interesting was there was a lot of research done on the components of blood that came out that year, leading to identification and naming of the components. Too cool!