People of England, your attention please. If you count yourself as an ally of trans people, here's an opportunity for real assistance. Good guide in quoted post, but do please use your own words where you can.

Consultation open until 11.59pm on 25 June 2024 (BST). www.gov.uk/government/c...

It's December, so here are a collection of end of year digital housekeeping tasks you can do while chilling out for the holidays in order to improve your privacy and security for entering 2024 on a good footing. You don't have to do all of them, but they're stuff to consider!

The origin of various band names. Not all of these have been covered by @andrewhickey.bsky.social's 500 Songs podcast yet, so apologies for any mistakes!

Due to a combination of historic dye availability and imitation, disproportionately many entities (including 29 countries) have flags that are red, white and blue

Happy Sunday. 🐦🐦

The etymologies of various computer language names. 🐦🐦

The word for tea in nearly every spoken language is a variation of either "tea" or "cha". Both come from Chinese (via different varieties) with tea mostly spreading by sea and cha by land along the Silk Road. There are however a few languages with unrelated terms. Does anyone know of any others? 🐦🐦

The most distinctive glyphs, glyph pairs and glyph triplets in different European languages, based on comparing each language's Wikipedia to others that use the same script

Apart from pineapple/ananas, the other word where English is often considered a weird outlier is Easter, for which many European countries use a word derived from the Greek and Aramaic Pascha. In fact this too is very far from universal, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. 1/5

Countries that turkey (the bird) is named after in different languages.

Logographic scripts make up the vast majority of characters encoded in Unicode, with Chinese characters alone making up two thirds.

A selection of English false cognates: words that look like they're related but aren't. Or at least not related etymologically, as their modern similarity is often the result of folk etymology bringing them closer together than they started out.

A categorisation of two-letter English words. The high ratio of "function words" versus "content words" is due to the so-called three letter rule, where content words were historically augmented with phonetically redundant letters, leading to homophones such as in/inn, be/bee, etc.

The word for pineapple is 'ananas' is most European languages. However, this isn't as universal as is sometimes suggested: at least a third of the world's population (and 5 of the 10 most spoken languages) call it something else.

The etymologies of common computer terms

Another etymology image. Any omissions?

Another language image. The images I post were all created by me, so any corrections, questions or suggestions welcome!

Testing out image posting with an etymology map of words derived from place names. Also curious if there’s any engagement at all with no followers or hashtags.