this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Showerthoughts
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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.
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They have historically said aluminum in Canada too…
It’s not an American term. It’s literally what the British discoverer of the metal named it (after originally naming it Alumium), both because it resembled platinum as well as wanting to associate it with the more prestigious metal.
Aluminium is actually the “incorrect” way of spelling it anyway because it comes from the second neuter declination from Latin where -um is the correct way. Which is why you have plumbum (lead, Pb), argentum (silver, Ag), aurum (gold, Au), ferrum (iron, Fe), hydrargyrum (mercury, Hg), copper (cuprum, Cu), stannum (tin, Sn), molybdenum, lanthanum, and tantalum. Arsenic was originally arsenicum as well.
The second neuter declension from Greek is where you get -on elements like the noble gasses. Neon, krypton, argon, xenon, radon. And then helium, which by its Greek etymology should be helion instead of helium. Also Silicon, carbon, boron, and oganesson.
Oganesson by the IUPAC rules should actually be Oganessium, because the naming rules required all new elements to end in -ium regardless of properties. They ended up naming it oganesson because it falls in the noble gas group, even though it’s predicted to be a metallic solid at room temp and not a gas at all.
I genuinely love this response. It's so detailed and in-depth that it makes me wish for a "Umm... Actually" Lemmy community.
I'm all for pedantry, but that's just excuses; desperate nitpicking to justify being the only two countries to use the term.
Edit: Thin epidermium. Hey, did you guys know rhotic 'r's are the correct pronunciation?
Their explanation does nothing to justify the number of countries that use that pronunciation. It merely denotes the etymological history.
Ostensibly, granted.
No, it’s clear you are simply applying the number in an attempt to discredit their logic, but the current number of countries has nothing to do with the fact that the British started spelling and pronouncing it differently, not the Americans.
And it wouldn’t be a big deal if you were capable of acknowledging that languages evolve regionally and that the evolutions are valid. But you can’t do that because it would ruin your ability to shame other English-speaking countries for their own regional linguistic evolutions whenever they diverge from the UK.
I'm not trying to discredit anything at all, in fact it was interesting, but it doesn't hold water with me in this particular instance. Normally I 'could care less' how much paasta with toonafish and 'erbs they wanna eat at the huvvercraft ternament, but this is a scientific term the world has standardised and to eschew that is just obstinate.