Things I learned while looking up other things, 2020.2.11
Obviously the biggest February-related thing of 2020 is that it's a Leap Year! People born on a Leap Day may be called leaplings or leapers. (Wordnik is a leapling, having been originally incorporated on Leap Day in 2008.)
Thanks to all who sent me responses to the first TIL! Some things learned from you, dear readers:
"People tend to get more visual information from the right side of a speaker's mouth than the left or even the whole mouth." h/t Dan Russell, who sent me information about the McGurk effect (note: does not mention chickens at ALL).
A skull-banker is an Australian term for a loafer or tramp. h/t Jim Kang (and you should really follow his bots newsletter). "In an article in the Argus on 11 May 1857, Henry R. Rae thought that the term scowbanker derives from “skull banker”, someone “who carried his purse in his skull”." (found in Colonial Australian Fiction)
"Mirativity, initially proposed by Scott DeLancey, is a grammatical category in a language, independent of evidentiality, that encodes the speaker's surprise or the unpreparedness of their mind."
This whole interview with Lorraine Daston is very interesting but this sentence really caught my attention: "We can read interesting correspondences from astronomers at Oxford and Harvard recruiting the first generation of women college graduates to perform calculations for half the wages of men."
There's a Unicode proposal to add the 'acclamation point' and other punctuation marks suggested by the writer Hervé Bazin. I personally want the 'love point'—hey, it's almost Valentine's Day—so I may use this workaround in the meantime. Bazin also proposed a phonemic orthography for French, and I would use the 'love point' and the 'acclamation point' to express my feelings about that idea if only I could.
Hubins (or Hubains) were medieval French beggars who carried forged certificates stating they were on a pilgrimage to or from the shrine of Saint Hubert, to be cured after having been bitten by a rabid dog. (St Hubert's keys were an early 'treatment' for rabies.) This whole chapter on the Argot (organized medieval French mendicants) from this 1867 book is great (but strong CW for anti-Roma violence). Louchebem was a code used by the butchers of Les Halles, but I can't find much else about it than the name. (Good tradecraft, French butchers!)
I've recently returned from a week of open-source mayhem in Belgium (attending the Sustain, FOSDEM, and CopyLeft conferences), so this edition could have been filled with Cool Open Source Things I Learned, but I'm limiting myself to just this one thing—while looking up "freedom of panorama" I found that France limits that freedom to noncommercial use, which means that French Wikimedia Commons editors have to police and delete certain pictures that include recent French architecture. (Also, even though the Eiffel Tower is out of copyright, the lighting system, considered as an artistic work, is not, and so the owners of the tower claim copyright on images of the lit-up tower at night.)
Tigers and snow leopards have nonthreatening, purr-equivalent sound called a prusten. The verb form is chuffle.
If you find cool things while looking up other things and need to share them, I'd love to see them! Just hit 'reply'. :)
Your friend,
Erin