MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • Just to piggyback on this. The simple truth is that lot of things are just called things because they resemble other things, either in form or function.

    Coffee is not a bean; beans come from legumes, coffee fruit seeds are roughly bean sized and shaped.

    Cacao and vanilla are also not legumes.

    The peanut is a legume like beans and peas, but the it’s fruit treated like a culinary nut.

    Cashews are not true nuts. They Grow outside the actual fruit.

    Nut milk and butter do not come from mammary glands.

    Tea is made for the leaves of the tea plant (Camellia sinensis), which is a shrub or small tree, but many infusions of dried plant matter are often referred to as teas. The Tea Tree (Melaleuca) of oil fame is a different plant entirely. It got its name because some sailors made a ‘tea’ from its leaves after they ran out of real tea leaves.

    Currants (genus Ribes) are actually named after raisins. Raisins of Corinth were small raisins that were produced and exported from… well… Corinth. Over time ‘Corinth’ morphed into ‘currant’, they dropped the ‘raisins of’, and the local small dryable fruit started being referred to as a currants too. Eventually, production of the tiny raisins migrated to other parts of Greece and some smart guy thought “Hey! Let’s market these fancy tiny raisins that we are importing from Zante (the greek island Zakynthos) by calling them Zante Currants to distinguish them from the common local currants.






  • You don’t need religion to be a moral person, and you don’t have to reject religion to act amorally. But there is no perfect, universal, scientific morality. Cultures, communities, individuals will vary on what they consider a moral act, and morality can change with circumstance. When different moralities interact, there will be conflict. And the amoral (or rather those, who do not subscribe to the same morality as those around them) will always use others’ morality as a tool to manipulate, a curtain to hide behind, a weapon to wield, and a shield to defend with.

    Religion helps communities to build a common morality in order to reduce tensions and foster fellowship within the group. But there will always be communities. There will always be disagreements, confusion, frustration, pride, loyalty, forgetfulness, honor, greed, hunger, struggle, disease, countervailing needs and desires, and mercy. The absence of religion would not stop people from seeking safe harbor and kinship in others, whether that is social clubs, fandoms, sports teams, political parties, activist organizations, etc. And when that kinship is endangered or perceived to be endangered, the absence of religion will not stop people from seeking to obstruct, forestall, eliminate, or revenge against whatever or whomever is perceived to be the cause.



  • Second point: the English language is heavily influenced by several historical processes

    WARNING: I am not a linguist or historian and the following is greatly simplified, potentially to the point of falsity

    1. The invasions of Germanic tribes: Angles & Saxons most notably, settled in what we now call England (Angle Land) and pushed the Celtic tribes west and north. Leaving mostly Germanic speaking peoples in the south and East.

    2. The Vikings raids: another wave of Germanic speaking peoples raided and eventually settled in parts of the island, while no less violent than the earlier invasions, it did result in more intermingling of the local Germanic and the Norse Germanic languages than the previous Germanic/Celtic languages did.

    3. The Norman Conquest: This invasion was more of a top-down invasion, where a French speaking monarchy replaced the English speaking monarchy. For a time French became the language of esteem, and state business was conducted in French, while outside the aristocracy, the common folk would use common English in their day-to-day. This is why a lot of modern legal and technical words, like litigate, defendant and plaintiff, have roots through French while rude words (“vulgar” comes from the Latin for “common”) often have Germanic roots. See: penis/vagina/intercourse vs. dick/cunt/fuck

    4. Colonization and globalization: English speakers went out and invaded a lot of places. In addition to extracting resources, wealth and slaves from those places, they took a lot of words too, and just kinda squished them into the language where they could fit. Colonizers also forced English upon the invaded territories much like the Norman’s forced French upon England. Now you have many more English speakers in the world who are also have fusing their own languages into local dialects of English and English words into their native languages. All this gets mixed up into an era of global trade, travel and communication, and some words just get caught up in the global zeitgeist and make their way into common English usage.

    5. Also, the Church and Romans are mixed up in there somewhere, but I have forgotten how.