👋Welcome back to the Midweek Newsletter
Issue #156: Very Strange Engineering Interviews, Dispatches from the Time Travel, and Distractions
Harris Sockel (Harris Sockel)
English is a very strange language. I’m glad to be a native speaker because our odd idioms (“burning the freezer”? “cold turkey”) seem almost designed to confuse outsiders. Early in my career, I taught English as a second language and remember how difficult it was for everyone to spell “bomb,” “grave,” and “comb” almost the same but pronounce them completely differently.
Look, English is actually three languages standing on each other's shoulders and wearing trench coats. (Mainly German, Latin, and Greek.) “Comb” is Germanic, while “bomb” and “grave” are Latinate, although their pronunciations were different in the Middle Ages, people still aren't sure why.
However, it’s more complicated than that because (as we shared in Issue #152) modern English also includes African, Arabic, and Japanese-derived words, such as karaoke (meaning “empty orchestra” in Japanese) or zombie (“spirit” in Kikongo).
Recently, on Medium, Robin Wilding explored how to get weird English:
The goose's stinky fowl becomes a goose
Yet moose are never
Many mice are little mice
But houses are never heaths
This is a fun poem because it lists all the absurd rules we live with - often not knowing why they exist! English is a bit like a very old codebase. Over time, it’s a residue of millions of decisions made by overlapping crowds… it’s optimized for flexibility and expansion rather than ease of use.
Finally, if you’re wondering about Moose vs. Goose: Moose recently entered English from Algonquin (an indigenous language of what is now Eastern Canada), while goose is an older English word because geese actually existed in England.
⚡Lightning: Great, recent Medium stories in one sentence or less
- I was struck by this weird story about engineering interviews (the emphasis is half… wait for it), which includes a useful lesson: if you’re going to give candidates a task, pay them a fair hourly rate and make the task as close as possible to what they would do on the job.
- The secret to the 37 minutes most Americans spend preparing meals each day: always cut vegetables beyond what you need for the time and store them for next time, so you never have to start from scratch, as Kaki Okumura explains.
- Every era's tour includes Easter eggs, like when Taylor pointed the microphone at backup dancer Kam, he replaced the lyrics with a word in the host language - just Swift obsessed with building community among her fans, as Dana Dubois wrote last month looking at Swift in Munich).
Your Daily Practical Wisdom: Good Distractions
Distractions aren’t always bad! If you find yourself distracted by the same thoughts or pursuits, it may be a sign of interest - your subconscious is trying to tell you that you should be doing more of that.
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By Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis edited and produced
Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us at: tips@medium.com