this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
49 points (79.5% liked)
Showerthoughts
40441 readers
384 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's a question of shorthand and relative distance to the country. In most European languages, the spelling equivalent of America refers to the country by default. The continent as an entity doesn't get mentioned that much and when it does either context gets you there or a regional attribute like a cardinal direction or central. In my experience this applies to British English as well. "The United States" is often more cumbersome in translation and might require grammatical inflection when used in a local language - and confusingly could refer to Mexico as well. Funny enough though some languages adopted "USA" as another way to refer to the country, even if in translation this should get you a different letter combination.
Because of the dominance of the English in the United Kingdom, a lot of continental Europeans lazily refer to the UK as their version of "England." Might be Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, a channel island or what have you. We gave up in trying to distinguish. People and how they call places are like that. Quiet understanding beats accuracy.
UK always struck me as a bit imperialist wrt (Northern) Ireland, GB more neutral… but seemingly Scotland isn’t a massive fan of that one either, so
I think that is a slight misconception. The full name is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So UK≠GB. Great Britain is just the three contiguous home nations (and possibly all the weird little islands I think). And then the British Isles include all the islands including all of Ireland. It is no wonder people are confused.
I just meant the name “United Kingdom” was conceived not long after the crushing of the Irish Rebellion where thousands of people were killed trying to secede from a union that’d fifty years later cause the Great Famine