Link Banana

I now know who to blame whenever I feel bad about using “they” as a singular pronoun.

Anne Fisher (1719-78) was not only a woman of letters but also a prosperous entrepreneur. She ran a school for young ladies and operated a printing business and a newspaper in Newcastle with her husband, Thomas Slack. In short, she was the last person you would expect to suggest that he should apply to both sexes. But apparently she couldn’t get her mind around the idea of using they as a singular.

And along with promising that soon the dark days of the plural-only “they” will pass into memory, the piece mention a pronoun I’d heard in lore, and begun to consider apocryphal: thon.

Now if only we could settle on a second-person plural more accurate than “you”…

(via Daring Fireball)

You know that symbol in email addresses that you don’t know the name of? The one that you always replace with “at”? Well, I’ve been saving two links about it:

• Bits tells a brief story of it’s move onto keyboards and into email:
  

  The symbol ended up on typewriter keyboards after it evolved over the centuries into commercial accounting shorthand for the phrase “at the price of” in records of transactions written by English merchants.

  That’s why the symbol was sitting on a computer keyboard in 1971 when an engineer named Ray Tomlinson decided to use it in the first e-mail address to send the first e-mail.

• In the LRB, Daniel Soar tells a characteristically longer story, including this tidbit:
  

  This legerdemain is clearly nonsense but it’s no less crazy than the various cutesy attempts by languages across the world to naturalise the sign by making it an animal emblem: in Korean it’s apparently a snail, in Danish an elephant’s trunk, in Turkish a ram, in Hungarian a maggot, in many Slavonic languages a monkey, apart from in Russian, where – inexplicably – it’s a dog.

In documenting a few of the freeway on-ramps, parking lots, and other monstrosities that have replaced some of America’s ornate original train stations, The Infrastructurist makes a cogent case for historical preservation (and the headaches that implies).

(via BB)

What’s most interesting about “minicows” which are apparently experiencing a “miniboom” because they’re more efficient in a feed to commercial-cut analysis, is that they’re not some new scientific breakthrough, but old technology. The “miniature” breeds that some farmers love are just the regular cows from 100 years ago.

“Feed prices were relatively cheap, and grazing lands were accessible,” Lemenager said. “The plan was to get more meat per animal. But it went way too far. The animals got too big and eat so much.”

(via Human Nature)

Phil Dingra pulls some of the most interesting ideas generated from a great Reddit discussion about what beliefs history will find laughable or abhorrent.

(via Waxy)

Mark Dowie — in an adaptation from his recent book — examines a conflict I’d never considered: that between those trying to conserve a wilderness and those who’d historically made their home there.

Refugees from conservation have never been counted; in fact they’re not even officially recognized as refugees. But the number of people displaced from traditional homelands worldwide over the past century, in the interest of conservation, is estimated to be close to 20 million, 14 million in Africa alone. It is a sad history, and one that has forced conservationists to reevaluate the hero status of their movement’s founders, and to reconsider the idea of protecting biological diversity by removing humans from the mix.

I was surprised to learn that Henry David Thoreau was a pencilmaker, but this is the real meat:

On April 30, 1844, Thoreau started a blaze in the Concord Woods, scorching a 300-acre swath of earth between Fair Haven Bay and Concord. The fire was an accident, but the destruction of valuable woodland, the loss of firewood and lumber, and the narrowly avoided catastrophe that almost befell Concord itself angered the local residents and nearly ruined Thoreau’s reputation. For years afterward, Thoreau could hardly walk the streets of his hometown without hearing the epithet “woods burner.”

The portrait Pipkin paints, of an adrift and struggling writer in his mid-twenties, is an angle on Thoreau I’d never seen before.

I’ve noticed that Google now adds to the search results of some searches a timeline of when that term is mentioned in sources — apparently a combination of newspapers, books, and websites. A few observations made using the tool:

• Many events have peaks in ten-year anniversaries of their first happening. See for example: Hiroshima, Apollo 11.
• Recession seems reasonably well correlated with market feelings.
• The historical usage of some terms in interesting. Try for example, piracy and Black Friday.
• “Apollo 13” got a definite boost when the movie came out.
• Some terms show the tool still has bugs. Mesozoic for example. (The peak at 2000BC, for example appears to be caused by a misinterpretation of a citation.)

Obviously the validity of all of these observations is limited by my limited understanding of how the thing works and its bugs.

Angus McLeod has made the strangest study-aid I think I’ve ever seen.

(via Strange Maps)

Though it’s not exceptionally deep (not to mention aged in my Instapaper account for a few months), Sara Dickerman’s story of the cows historical journey from farmer’s field to feedlot and hamburger patty is pretty good.

It reminds me of my argument — which I’ve thus far failed to live up to — that no one should be able to eat meat that hasn’t (at least) watched an animal killed for that purpose in front of them.

The article in the last post mentions that both leotard and cardigan are eponyms. I hadn’t known that.

Other surprises from a list of eponyms on Wikipedia:

• lynching
• bloomers
• silhouette
• boycott
• sideburns
• chauvanism
• guy
• gerrymandering
• mausoleum
• shrapnel

This is interesting:

But there’s a wide range of definitions of “home” among Americans who have lived in at least one place besides their original hometown: 26% say it’s where they were born or raised; 22% say it’s where they live now; 18% say it’s where they have lived the longest; 15% say it’s where their family comes from; and 4% say it’s where they went to high school.

(via Big Contrarian)

I enjoyed this remarkably complete — Super Mario Soda, anyone? — compilation of the varieties of branded sodas no longer being produced.

(via BuzzFeed)

I’d never spent much time thinking about it, but I really enjoyed Mike Johnston’s thoughts on the distinct lack of (monetary) value inherent in most middle-aged objects.

(via @ironicsans)

Andy Biao describes felix’s post as a “Metafilter’s history of” the central feature of the Oval Office. The description seems just about perfect.

I really like Mike Dresser’s idea.

An old friend’s first venture into “e-junk” taught me a bit of science and history:

These things are some of the biggest planes ever built. The largest, dubbed the Caspian Sea Monster, was longer than a football field, could move over 1000 tonnes of cargo, and crossed the Caspian at speeds over 250mph. The Soviets kept the project secret, so you can imagine the poor fishermen who undoubtedly found themselves in the path of these speeding behemoths. Keep in mind they never flew more than a few meters above the water.

The question had never really occured to me, but the name certainly wasn’t rare:

Christ’s given name, commonly Romanized as Yeshua, was quite common in first-century Galilee. (Jesus comes from the transliteration of Yeshua into Greek and then English.) Archaeologists have unearthed the tombs of 71 Yeshuas from the period of Jesus’ death. The name also appears 30 times in the Old Testament in reference to four separate characters—including a descendent of Aaron who helped to distribute offerings of grain (2 Chronicles 31:15) and a man who accompanied former captives of Nebuchadnezzar back to Jerusalem (Ezra 2:2).

Who says reality 200 years ago has nothing to do with today?

“The divide between the (more free-market) PO and the (more populist) PiS almost exactly follows the old border between Imperial Germany and Imperial Russia, as it ran through Poland! How about that for a long-lasting cultural heritage?!?” How about: amazing, bordering on the unbelievable?

Long a sucker for both well-written counterintuitive opinions and Frank Capra, I have mixed feelings about Wendell Jameson’s argument. His thesis:

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.