The dot on a lowercase i or j is called a tittle.  Without the tittle, the word tittles and titties would be easily confused.  Thankfully, we don’t have to suffer that confusion.  It is believed that in the phrase “to a T,” meaning exactly or meticulously, the T is short for tittle. You would be incorrect to assume that titties may also derive from tittle, as a nipple is no more than a bodily tittle.  Wow, that sentence sounded like something out of a creepy Dr. Seuss book.

P.S. tit comes from teat.

E pluribus unum— out of many, one.    Before the Civil War, the United States was generally accepted as a plural noun.  For example, we used to say, “the United States are full of people seeking political freedom.”  Around the time of the Civil War, we started to view the country as a singular entity, rather than just a bunch of united states.  Now we say, “the United States is full of people seeking the new Big Mac Snack Wraps from McDonald’s.”   Watching the Olympics, I very often hear the commentators reinforcing the country’s singularity…  I also see a lot of McDonald’s commercials.

Within in the next century, more than half of the world’s spoken languages will disappear.  To preserve the languages and to provide comparative linguistic research of the lost languages in the future, the Long Now Foundation has created the Rosetta Disk (named after the Rosetta Stone, which, created over 2000 years ago, helped linguists decipher hieroglyphics).  The Rosetta Disk is a 3-inch nickel disk that has 1500 languages micro-etched on to it.  In order to see the 13,000 pages of language documentation, one needs to magnify the disk 650 times with a microscope.  It should be noted that the Long Now Foundation did not invent Viagra, no matter what the foundation’s name suggests.  Swallowing a Rosetta Disk will not give you an erection, but it may give you a case of verbal diarrhea.

… get it?!  …

Today I learned that every noun is capitalized in the German language. German spelling reforms even occurred in 1996 that made the capitalization system more consistent; it ensured that every noun was capitalized, even nouns in expressions (to ride a Bike).  Unlike English, the first-person-singular pronoun (‘I’ in English) is lower case (ich), unless it starts a sentence.  Thanks to this, I can really get a good grasp of the German language.  Oh wait.  No I can’t.  But at least I can tell you which words are nouns in the sentence.  That way I can piece together the sentence and figure out its meaning.  Oh wait.  No I can’t.  Every sentence has a noun.  Crap.  Well I can tell you that the German word for capitalization is Großschreibung.  What!?  I just grasped the capitalization thing, now they are throwing that weird giant letter B thing in on me.  Apparently, that stupid letter is called an Eszett and is used in place of a double s.  Whoever invented that letter is an aßhole.