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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Happens in most languages.

    Also, many languages have a link between deafness and lacking intelligence, e.g. dumb meaning “not able to speak” and “not intelligent”.

    In general, being sensitive to people with disabilities (both physical and mental) is a rather young concept, hence anything that would make someone not be able to be part of society is often also an insult.

    That’s also why e.g. terms linked deafness/muteness are often an insult to someone’s intelligence, while e.g. terms linked to blindness are not. Blind people might be unable to perform some things seeing people are able to, but blindness doesn’t necessarily limit someone’s ability to be part of a society unaccomodating to people with disabilities.












  • Actually, it is.

    It derives from Latin infans where “in-” is a negation prefix and “fans” is the present participle form of “for”, which translates to “to speak”.

    So an infant is a non-speaker (too small to speak).

    But my opener was of course a joke, where I purpously misunderstood what “fant” is derived of, by claiming that “fant” must be the opposite of a child, thus an adult.

    There are tons of Latin words in the English language and many of them only survived in English in their compounded form (e.g. “in-fant”, where no other version of the actual verb in there survived, except the negated form).

    Often the parts of these Latin root words have no meaning at all anymore in English, so that people don’t notice that they are actually using compound words and also the original meaning of the word is forgotten.

    Not a lot of people would associate “infant” with “hearing”.



  • Well, political forecasting is like reading tea leaves even for professionals and even when it’s just for the next year.

    So it’s safe to say, nobody knows what’s going to happen.

    But generally speaking, political tensions like the one currently in the US need some form of release. They build and build until something lets all of this vent.

    Historically, these vents have been (civil) wars on their soil, revolts or catastrophies that require the country to be literally rebuilt.

    The US hasn’t really had any of these for a very long term. Wars in foreign countries can reduce the temperature a bit, but only until the public’s attention span hasn’t passed.

    The US system is also built for polarization, so let’s see what happens.

    If they are lucky, some kind of worker’s uprising could be enough. If they are unlucky, they are going to have a dictatorship next year.

    But nobody knows what’s going to happen.