Etymologist

Exploring Global Wealth Compare GDP, net worth, and market cap of countries, billionaires, and companies on a unified scale

First post!

This is a site I made that lets you compare the net worth of billionaires and corporations to the GDP of entire countries.

Take a look! I want to raise awareness of the scale. There are many people and companies with more wealth than the annual output of nations.

Let’s fix it.

Corporate Overlap in the DOW Shared board members and officers within the DOW 30

This is an interactive I put together of the board and executive overlap between DOW30 companies. It’s incredibly incestuous. And Chevron is its heart

I was going to wait to share this because I just shared the global wealth one, but most of these are in freefall today

While we’re at it, other QOL:

• change your comment visibility threshold to 0 from 2
• turn on all the in app media players (if you want them)
• @graysky.app is a mobile client w keyword mute
• 📌 saves the parent comment to this feed (unique to each user)

⬇️

bsky.app/profile/unde...

What else?

A screenshot from the Bluesky social media app displays a user's post, with a search query "from:me infographic" in the search bar. The user, identified as "me," points out an infographic about the moon, mentioning its high resolution and ability to zoom into named areas with full topographic detail.

I just learned this; maybe everyone else already knew, but you can use from:me in search and then whatever terms to find things in your own post feed

🤩 lifesaver

An educational poster titled 'Stages of Mania in Bipolar I-II' by One Impossible Thing, featuring a detailed breakdown of five distinct stages: Euthymia, Hypomania, Mania (Manic Episode), Mania (Mixed Episode), and Psychosis (Psychotic Episode). Each stage is accompanied by descriptive text and symbolic illustrations, such as a balanced scale for Euthymia and a crown for Mania, to represent the varying symptoms and behaviors experienced during each phase. The poster uses a color scheme of blue, yellow, and white, and includes contact information for Luke Steuber at the top.

Hey folks!

With new people joining, I want to highlight the Bipolar community here. It's been fantastic to have these convos and very helpful to me.

This infographic was made with input from the community - just one example! Meanwhile, I'm going to post feeds and call some folks out in comments!

Get more from one impossible thing* on Patreon *at a time

Also! I'm going to launch the paid/nifty bits of the Patreon in the next few days

If Patreusers (?) are willing I'd sure appreciate a free follow on it to make me look popular and intelligent and in demand 😆

FR tho, thanks if you can. This layoff culture is murdering me, gotta try something new

Time to swarm

A four panel comic; a man is being awarded for being the world’s whiniest little shit. He says no I don’t wanna be the whiniest little shit, and then they have to give him two awards.

Matt Gaetz this week

Canadian languages facing extinction | Lexcelera Every 14 days another language dies. Native Canadian languages are among the most diverse and most endangered on the planet...

Hate to be the bearer of bad news but only five out of 72 first peoples’ languages in Canada have an active speaking community

A map of Canada with the names of each territory explained

I don’t think any of us want to be Americans right now, so here’s Canada! It has (or, sadly, had) an enormous variety of first peoples’ languages.

A chart of how to encode letters in Morse

Ever seen a chart of Morse code? It’s really cool! There are some very creative keyboard designs based on this (and other schema) to help people with disabilities communicate more quickly via switch or eye gaze

Three different sources! You came prepared!

I accept that this is common now

Survey! What do y’all call it when you stick out your tongue and go like ”thbbbb” at someone? When I was growing up we called that ”blowing a raspberry” but I can’t imagine that’s universal.

A bartender asks a man “which beer would you like;” the man says IPA so the bartender responds wit/ bia wud jur lnik? (IPA)

Sorry not sorry

A chart of evolution of the word “two” visualized as this weird sunflower thing

This is a very interesting chart of the origins of the word “two,” but whoever made it … well, I don’t know what they were going for really. Fireworks? Enjoy

I always wondered why there was such a variety of KitKats in Japan! TIL

An inscription reading “to Lila Howard with loving greetings, helen Keller”

The jacket cover of the book: THE STORY OF MY LIFE by Helen Keller This famous story of a courageous woman's battle against overwhelming disabilities was first published in 1902. It has become, in its way, a classic of inspirational writing and a lighthouse of hope for the afflicted. Since 1902 a great deal has happened in the life of Helen Keller. But the great struggle which liberated her from the dark and soundless world in which she lived had been won, and that is the story which is told in this book. This new edition of The Story of my Life contains Miss Keller's original auto-biography, plus her letters from 1887 to 1901, and an account of her education. Helen Keller has seen light in dark-ness, has heard through the barrier of deafness, and has broken the silence with her voice. She tells with disarming simplicity how she overcame, with Anne Sullivan's help and understanding, the tremendous difficulties of learning to live without either sight or hearing.

Probably my favorite book that I own is this one signed by Helen Keller. Since I was posting about orthography last week … check out her handwriting! She was a rad person

Bluesky sees record signups day after Musk says X will go paid-only The day isn't even over yet Bluesky has already seen its biggest influx of new users in a single-day

one day after Elon Musk said he would start charging all users for X, Bluesky is seeing its biggest single-day in new user signups mashable.com/article/blue...

An infographic of 20 candy bars with considerable additional text

I’m grumpy this morning so we’re going with the origins of the names of candy. Mmmm candy

An exchange on Tumblr: fun fact: the reason that the plural of goose is geese but the plural of moose is not meese is because goose derives from an ancient germanic word undergoing strong declension, in the pattern of foot/feet and tooth/teeth, wherein oo is mutated to ee. however 'moose' is a native american word added to the english lexicon only ~400 years ago, and lacks the etymological reason to be pluralized in that way. Second person: Oh baby. Keep talking dirty to me.

Late night is for language memes

A map of the most commonly spoken native languages in India. There are 40+

A map of grammatical gender differences across languages in India. To have a difference that fundamental implies a long period of separate evolution

India is incredibly linguistically diverse! Here’s some cool maps to illustrate

Fun etymological fact: “gif” was actually an old English word pronounced as /jɪf/ (it later became just “if”). So every time people debate the pronunciation of gif, all I can think of is “yiff”

img dot yiff

A sample of scripts for which there are no Unicode equivalents - apologies

Speaking of cool alphabets - technically orthography - check out these amazing scripts from West Africa. The area is historically so resource rich that people didn’t have to travel to hunt or trade, so languages evolved in isolation

On the topic of invented languages: the most famous one, Esperanto, has been used for several entire films. One of them is 1966’s “Incubus” starring William Shatner, and I highly recommended it after a few drinks with friends

A picture of a goat in a children’s book with the words “get killing” The Swedish word for 'Goat' is 'Get' and the word for 'Kid' is 'Killing' hence this spread from a children's book:

Last language meme for the weekend… get killing, kids!

Above the rivers?

A four panel comic, a man and his dog with this dialog: Alright girl! I got these dog talk buttons! So you can say stuff like walk or park or- 6000 WALK TREAT the OUTSIDE VE RIP SORP @UDE DONG Dude. You. Have. Got. To. Get. Laid. You. Are. Bumming. Me. Out. So. Hard. So after that I just stopped making an effort... You're. A. Good. Guy Hank. You. Just. Need." To. Open. Up. More. eldercactus

Some more weekend fun. My field is augmentative communication so this hits home

Lisa Simpson at a whiteboard with the sentence “before was was was, was was is”

She’s right

"Zero fucks given" in other languages 6. It's sausage to me (German) 5. I care a cucumber (Spanish) 4. It can oxidize on my anus (Dutch) 3. I slap my balls on it (French) 2. It interests me as much as a kilogram of shit (Finnish) 1. Flowers on my dick and bees all around (Greek)

Weekend etymology memes: late night edition (M for Mature)

A chocolate monkey melting in a pot while trying to explain Basque

Weekends are for language memes