Language

The 280-character spike

The length distribution of tweets has shifted in response to raised character limits, but it's still the case that a disproportionate number of tweets use all the characters they're given.

Boats are required by international law to have a wheelhouse poster listing their "general particulars", i.e., a list of statistics, properties, and other bits of information necessary to get a basic view of the vessel.

As far as I can tell, the phrase is not otherwise in common use, but it really deserves to catch on more generally for the type of information you might find in a Wikipedia infobox.

Sunflowers are false flowers

The "flower" part of a sunflower is actually a pseudanthium: a collection of individual flowers that look like petals surrounding a disc. Sunflowers share this property with daisies, which are part of the same family.

The head of a sunflower or a daisy can also be called an inflorescence, which is the word for a cluster of flowers regardless of whether the cluster looks like a flower or not; hydrangeas and lupins also grow in inflorescences.

Singular 'pea' is a backformation

The word pea was originally pease in the singular and peasen in the plural. Eventually, speakers understandably interpreted the -s in pease as the plural suffix rather than just a sound in the original Latin pisum/pisa and Greek πίσον, and the English singular pea was born.

The 140-character spike

A disproportionate number of my tweets are exactly 140 characters. I don't know whether that means I'm really good at Twitter or really bad. Sometimes it's the result of a too-long idea being meticulously edited down to size; sometimes it's purely chance. Either way, I find 140-character tweets oddly satisfying — and based on a large dataset of tweets, it looks like I'm not the only one.

Rieaodnmzd stgirns

According to an old piece of email forwarding-spam, it's easy to read text even if you scramble all but the first and last letters in each word. But as the title of this post demonstrates, the truth is a bit more complicated.

Most English words are short

Based on corpus data, over half of the words in a typical page of English text has four or fewer letters, with the average word length being slightly less than five.