They read 1984 and went “That sounds perfect! Now how do we get to that point asap?”

Your comment made this post so much funnier than it already was 🤣

Meanwhile, India has annexed Madagascar

Disappointed that the article didn’t mention the fediverse

Imagine Jesus as a director of a company that accepts all sincere applicants. The director assumes responsibility for all the mistakes his employees make, but he doesn’t assume responsibility for people who only claim to be employees. People who purposely commit crimes get fired and applications by people who apply with the purpose of commiting crimes get rejected for not being sincere. (That’s not to say someone who once was fired can’t reapply if they’re actually sincere about it, but since God sees into people’s hearts and minds, you can’t trick him.)

Comedians and similar people who make content out of stuff they see in the news seem to be especially prone to this kind of thinking. They see an article about a phyics discovery or a math theorem or a sociology experiment and say something about science should focus on solving world hunger or curing cancer instead.

Seemingly ignorant of the facts that
a) Science isn’t a monolith, and a sociologist or mathematician isn’t a virologist or oncologist or whatever else would be needed for the problem they’re ranting about.
b) Even if someone happened to be in the correct field for the problem the idiot is ranting about, they often couldn’t help with the problem anyway because they’re lacking the required experience and knowledge and just throwing people at the problem doesn’t help if those people are grad students or barely postgrads.

Musk is a proponent of near-absolute free speech

Anything goes, so long as it doesn’t hurt his feelings personally

I also love Beule by David Gilbert at Carlsen. It nearly always made me go aww and smile reading a strip of it in the newspaper.

That said, I can’t recommend binge-reading it, it loses its charm that way.

Beule is the German name. I wasn’t able to find out how it’s called in any other language, even though it being published by Carlsen implies German is probably not the original language (I primarily associate Carlsen with Spirou/Gaston by Hergé, who is francophone Belgian, iirc)

Edit: it’s -> its

There is not a single word that’s universal to all languages.

1. Even if there had ever been one at some point, there are languages that have/had word retirement as part of the culture speaking it: If a word is used as someone’s name and that person dies, that word is now taboo and a new word is needed to refer to what the old word stood for.

2. Conlanging, especially by laypeople, often explicitly makes up most or all of its vocabulary from scratch or uses cyphers to make the connection invisible. I wouldn’t be surprised if a people made up their own secret language from scratch, maybe initially with very similar grammar, that developed into a native language for a community.

3. Have you heard of Cockney rhyming slang? Take a word like “fart”, use a two part word that rhymes with it, like “raspberry tart”, then drop the rhyming part. That leaves you with “raspberry” meaning “fart” and no discernible connection to the old words this utterance/meaning pair came from.

4. Sign languages are languages as well, and in multiple instances developed from the ground up without influence from the surrounding spoken languages.

“It’s okay, another orange currently has the orange brain cell, let me in”