kryptonite
I always hated the advice to make an L with your hands to see which one was Left. No one ever specified whether you’re supposed to have your palms facing you or facing away, so it’s ambiguous.
When I was a kid, I would picture a dining place setting because I knew the fork was on the left.
I have it on pretty good authority that everyone
That’s where your comment went wrong. Just about everything that anyone claims “everyone” does is false. Maybe “lots of people,” “most people,” or even “by far, most people” do a thing, but literally “everyone”? BS.
I don’t like looking at breasts, and I have absolutely no interest in them.
humans just put certain expectations into the word.
… which is entirely the way words work to convey ideas. If a word is being used to mean something other than the audience understands it to mean, communication has failed.
By the common definition, it’s not “intelligence”. If some specialized definition is being used, then that needs to be established and generally agreed upon.
It’s eth, actually, not thorn.
I had thought that eth was used in Old English for the voiced “th” and thorn for the unvoiced “th”, but Wikipedia says they were used interchangeably for both sounds.
You’re right otherwise. Thorn was not available on printing presses because they were being made in countries that didn’t use the letter, which is why the letter Y was used instead until “th” became more common.
As a kid, I had a small dictionary, so I checked whether “gullible” was in it in order to mess with my little sister. It wasn’t there, but I still got in trouble when my mom overheard me telling my sister, “Did you know gullible is not in this dictionary?”
I was miffed because I was telling the truth.