![]() ![]() In her description of the event, she mused that it's a good thing nobody was up to see her in that state. She bolted up from the toilet, underwear around her ankles, and waddle-ran out into the living room. Now, apparently camel/spider crickets have terrible eyesight, so their one defense against threats is to jump straight at them in hopes that it will scare them off. She saw one facing her, silently staring at her. She had gotten up in the middle of the night to use the restroom and was sitting on the toilet doing her business. Once I read a story online of a lady describing an encounter with a camel/spider cricket for the first time. When I've described them to others in this area, a few have called them camel crickets, others have called them spider crickets, but most have never encountered them either. My immediate thought was "ALIEN!" Because I had never seen or heard of them, I had no already-learned term for them. My first introduction was to see one of them perched on the headboard of our bed, just silently staring at me. We had recently moved, and the house apparently came with some of them. I had neither seen nor heard of those until about eleven years ago. I also refuse to call mountain lions "cougars" thanks to that term's association with a certain college in Provo. For example, I knew several people who called roly polies "potato bugs", but that seems to be mainly concentrated among LDS church members (which I'm not), so it never really caught on for me. There were a few questions that would have definitively identified me as from Utah had I answered differently. This link brings us to a quiz developed by New York Times graphics editor Josh Katz. So I've had a lot of influences from different places - which explains why most of my map is somewhere in the yellow-to-red range. I'm sort of a weird case because I grew up in Utah, live in Atlanta right now, and my parents were originally from the midwest. Bottom 3 are New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Philadelphia. Top 3 cities are Fresno, Modesto, and Sacramento - funny enough, the only one of those I've even been to is Sacramento, and I've never left the car there. The subhead: “The unexpectedly interesting story of car coatings and what they tell us about the modern world.Here's mine. We probably can’t.ģ) “ Watching Paint Dry” (Material World, 7 minutes, February 2023). A poll shows that about half of all men and about 20% of women think they could. I really love the interactivity on this one.Ģ) “ Think you can land a plane in an emergency? Pilots explain why you can’t.” (Washington Post, 9 minutes, March 2023). And some other things you should check out:ġ) “ Fake Signals and American Insurance: How a Dark Fleet Moves Russian Oil” (New York Times, 14 minutes, May 2023). I kind of wish they hadn’t fixed this one. Thursday: Making Money By Singing in Silence: I really love a good money-making loophole. Apparently, no one thought it was useful to keep archival purposes of advertisements for products that do not exist. Wednesday: The Soviet Plan to Make Real Ads for Fake Products: One of the things I meant to share in this piece - the vast majority of the ads created by this firm were lost to time. Its British and Irish dialect quiz involves answering 25 questions on how you talk casually with friends. I kind of wish they hadn’t fixed this one. The New York Times has come up with a quiz thats got everyone talking - literally. Tuesday: Why Europeans Can’t Score in Their Own Basket: I love a good rules loophole. I’d love to read through your discoveries! The Now I Know Week in Review But even though We’re all speaking the same language, divergent phrases and sayings crop up.Īnyway, take the quiz, and if you see something surprising, feel free to reply to this email to share. The purpose of language, primarily, is to facilitate communication, and if you’re reading these words, you read English (and probably can speak and write it, too). Terms like “you ‘uns,” or “goosy night” or “mountain screamer” are all things in parts of the United States. It’s eerie how close to perfect this is.īut what I found surprising is how many questions had answers that I had simply never heard of before. ![]() I’ve only lived in one tiny corner of the world - I’ve never lived south or west of Philadelphia, and I went to college near Boston. But the map, for me, is incredibly accurate. As long-time readers surely know by now, I live in the New York City area, where I match up best, unsurprisingly. Red areas are where I matched up the best blue ones are the worst. ![]()
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