Language Facts

There are now MLA guidelines to cite a tweet!

The Modern Language Association (MLA), or rather the bane of every high school student's existence, is an association that has designed official ways in which people can cite references on their essays without being charged with plagiarism. Fortunately, the MLA format is staying up to date with modern trends, because students are now able to cite a tweet properly. So, how do you do it?

Well, if you were writing an essay on an awesome website that gives you lots of cool facts, you would have to follow a few steps in order to cite it properly. Begin with the author's real name, as well as their username is paranthesis (the brackets that I'm using around this sentence). Next, provide the tweet in quotation marks, keeping it as originally posted. Conclude with the entry date and time of the publication and the medium of publication (Tweet).

Here's an example: OMG Facts, Celebs (OMGfactsCelebs). "A Chicago High School played Bieber’s “Baby” between classes and had students pay to stop it. The campaign raised $1,000 in 3 days." May 12, 2013, 11:30PM. Tweet.

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Seconds used to be called 'Second Minutes'

Seconds are passing constantly, and we never really pay attention to them unless we are timing something, waiting for something, or we happen to be looking directly at a clock. Like most things in the English language, referring to 1/60th of a minute is known as a 'second'. Although, few people are aware that referring to that particular unit of measurement as a 'second' is actually slang.

Let's rewind to the days of Middle English. In the middle ages, people called 1/60 of a minute 'second minutes' because it is the 'second' operation when dividing an hour by sixty. As time progressed, at some point people became extremely lazy and didn't want to say 'second minutes' so they just started saying 'seconds'!

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A New Mexico tribe speaks a language eerily similar to Japanese!

The Zuni tribe have perplexed anthropologists with their language. They speak a language that is too similar to Japanese to be coincidental. Anthropologists can't figure out why this would be the case.

Some similar words as an example. Clan in Zuni is 'kwe,' in Japanese 'kwai.' The word for priest is 'shawani' in Japanese and 'shiwani' in Zuni. Both Zuni and Japanese use the verb as the last word of a sentence, a feature only 45% of languages share. This might not seem like much, but the Zuni language is very different in this than other languages around them.

This sparked some research and scientist discovered that both Zuni and the Japanese have similar frequency of Type B blood, a rare kind of kidney disease and very specific oral traditions about their origins. The working theory is that Buddhist missionaries somehow made it to California around the 12th century somehow.

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The longest word in the English language is 189,819 letters long!

You really want to see what the word is, don't you? Well, for the sake of not taking up pages and pages filled with text , we can't exactly SHOW you the word in it's entirety. Although, the first few syllables of the word look like this "Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyl"...and that's only the first 42 letters. Good luck spelling out this tongue twister at the next spelling bee.

This word actually has a much simpler form for scientists to refer to. Scientists refer to the word simply as 'titin' and the really long, 189,819 letter word is the chemical name of titin, the largest known protein.

However, there is much debate as to whether or not this anomaly is even a word, because it isn't in any dictionaries. If that's the case, the NEXT largest word is 1,909 letters long, which is impressive, but not nearly as impressive as 'titin'.

For a little bit of perspective, Antidisestablishmentarianism is only 28 letters long. Want to learn some more really long words? Click the source!

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In a study requiring them to write out 'door' 30 times in 60 seconds, 68 percent of participants began to doubt that 'door' was a real word.

You’ve probably experienced repeating a word so many times that it doesn’t sound like a word, but have you ever considered that you could repeat a word so many times that you don’t believe it’s a word? Chris Moulin, of Leeds University, asked 92 volunteers to write out “door” 30 times in 60 seconds. Around 68% of participants began to show symptoms of ‘jamais vu,’ such as the doubt that “door” was even a real word.

Jamais vu is the phenomenon of recognizing a situation, but still feeling that it is unfamiliar. Dr. Moulin believes that a similar brain fatigue underlies the reason some schizophrenia patients believe that a familiar person has been replaced by an imposter.

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