this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

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Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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[–] Vinny_93@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (4 children)

The French and acronyms. You got NATO, but the French translate it so they call it OTAN. Directly translated, they also just say the 'States United'.

Anyone's guess who did word order first to find out why French is a silly language.

[–] justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

French predates English.

Also, bold calling a language silly in english

[–] birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 week ago

This comment belongs right in a badling sublemmy.

[–] AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I decided to look into this because I was curious.

The unification and regulation of the French language came about in 1653 with the founding of the Académie Française and it actually took a while for the revolutionaries to pivot from “liberty of language” to “the only language in France should be French” English was already established by this time and the vowel shift was basically complete.

According to Wikipedia, Middle French died out in the 17th century while Middle English died out in the 15th. Ergo: Modern English predates Modern French

If we check back farther it seems the two languages developed similarly though the arbitrary divides for each age of language (old, middle, modern) seem to show with English being first by roughly a century.

Of course this is all arbitrary since language doesn’t evolve discretely. However the Wikipedia entries for the oldest Gallo-Romance (precursor to French) is from 842CE, whereas old English poetry dates as early as 650-700CE. Once again suggesting English predates French.

Now there is a difficulty here with French because it originates from Vulgar Latin which could be considered older than English, but I’m not sure many would call it French since lots of European languages branched from Vulgar Latin

As for silliness… yeah no arguments there lol

Neat, I stand corrected.

I doubt the french history teacher I had who taught me that is still alive though.

[–] Hadriscus@jlai.lu 8 points 1 week ago

Japanese sentences (clauses) end with the verb. In Kiswahili/Shimaore a noun is followed by its possessive pronoun ("cup my", "spirit their"...). Languages are very diverse in that regard

[–] MicrowavedTea@infosec.pub 3 points 1 week ago

To be fair the same happens in Spanish with most acronyms