It probably won’t surprise anyone who knows me to find out I lean heavily on the ‘decades/centuries begin on the year that has a 1, not a 0’ side of the contention about when these things actually start.This article from Mental Floss has placated me a bit with its observation that it’s not really about …
I’m not sure that the authors of these strategies about finding the best place to park your car at the shopping centre ever experienced anything like the carparks at our local Coles and Woolworths Supermarkets. This video is another attempt to demonstrate that maths has uses in everyday life. Read more at Mental Floss.
For those who are still communicating with words rather than emojis or memes, this Mental Floss article borrows from Lifehacker and provides some tips regarding the use of the subjective ‘who’ or the objective ‘whom’ in sentences. The article starts out by observing that the words are not interchangeable: In casual messages with friends or …
This Mental Floss article links to an article on Slate about how to pluralise surnames, and then refers to some other posts that deal with how to add apostrophes in order to indicate possessive case for surnames. Plural and possessive, they’ve got that covered too. Just in time for the end of year and Christmas …
For a change this list of words being added to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary in 2018 not only contains words I know, but even a few that I’m surprised aren’t already there. Some abbreviations: guac, fave. Some tech words: force quit, predictive. Some geek words: adorbs, TL;DR. And more. Read the list at Mental Floss.
It’s always fun to keep up with collective nouns for groups of different animals. This article from Mental Floss has some I’d not heard of. A walk of snails (or an escargatoire) A coterie of prairie dogs. A bale of turtles. A wisdom of wombats. Among others. Some sound made up, but the ones I …
Articles about why ‘Close Door’ buttons on elevators don’t work, and the reasons why pop up from time to time. The practicalities behind their non-function make sense, but their presence in elevators even when not connected is still a bit odd. Read about it at Mental Floss, or search around the internet for plenty of …
