This year I learned lots of things. The most notable in each category are below. Let me know via anonymous comment if you knew any of these things already. (There was going to be a poll, but then the illness overtook me.)
- New Terms
- Skry, salience, grizzle, blind daffodils, innervation / ennervation, ocular (not optic) migraine, fridgescaping, assuage, blonde / blond
- Health
- Schizophrenia might be an autoimmune disorder.
- If you trigger certain neurons you see ghosts.
- It’s really hard having a twenty-year-old man’s sex drive.
- A blood test can identify bipolar disorder.
- The croup crops up in odd-numbered years.
- Strep vagina is a thing.
- There are several types of extra thumbs.
- Strokes don’t make you smell toast.
- You can get dimple surgery.
- You can get eclipse sickness.
- You can brew alcohol in your gut.
- We are on the verge of regrowing teeth.
- Some optometrists can scan your eyes and don’t ask “which is better?”
- Licorice and steroids don’t mix.
- Space
- The area code for Cape Canaveral is 3-2-1.
- The mid-sixties space race was more interesting than the late sixties space race
- There were other deaths associated with the Columbia Space Shuttle.
- Astroglide was invented by a rocket scientist.
- Many animals survived space.
- We detonated nuclear bombs in space.
- The name “Apollo 1” wasn’t official yet but they changed the rules for the widows.
- Human Nature
- Nigerians accept compliments more than New Zealanders.
- People failed a real-life Trolley Problem test.
- I could have voted in a French election had my grandmother been on the ball.
- Animals
- Cats Need Mouse Bones and yarn supervision.
- Cicadas pee fast.
- Cat teeth can slide back whence they came.
- Disney parks are full of feral cats.
- Skunks bone in February.
- Silk is unravelled cocoons made of worm spit.
- Toad poop is very bulky.
- You can totally make a dead dog lick its nose.
3 responses to “TYIL: 2025”
I did okay vocabulary-wise; I did not previously know about blind daffodils as a term, not sure if I knew about innervation (but very familiar with something being enervating, and knew there was a term for nerves pervading something vs. not), and while I had run across examples of fridgescaping before, I think I found out a term for it exists Right Here.
And now I can’t remember what the blond/blonde thing is.
I’m pretty sure I was mispronouncing assuage, though.
As for the non-vocabulary info, I definitely knew that silk was unraveled cocoons, which larva excrete as a thread (and that “worm safe” silk is less shiny and less durable than the kind where they kill the worm in the cocoon, because the threads of silk are, instead of being one looooong thread, all snipped a bit shorter if you let the critter eat its way out of the cocoon at the end of its metamorphosis), but I’m not entirely sure which of the others I knew (although I Definitely Didn’t Know most of the things on the list!).
Correction: assuage pronunciation was right, the “sycophant” doesn’t have two ns in it bit was the Thing Learned that day.
KC – that is KEY silk news. Also, blonde is one of the few feminine words in English.