Topic

Linguistics & Communication

A collection of 6 issues

From Victorian Luggage to Modern Lingo: The Origin of the Portmanteau

The term 'portmanteau' describes blended words like 'smog' and 'brunch,' but it originally named a two-part traveling suitcase. Lewis Carroll coined its linguistic meaning in 1871, when Humpty Dumpty compared a blended word to a suitcase with two meanings packed inside.

Why Your Fast Internet Still Buffers Unpacking Bandwidth and Bitrate

Bandwidth is your internet's maximum capacity, like a highway's width. Bitrate is the actual data of a stream, like cars on that highway. For smooth, high-quality streaming without buffering, your bandwidth must always be greater than the stream's bitrate.

From Rome to Riyadh: The Ancient Coin Hiding in Modern Money

The Roman Empire's influence survives not just in ruins, but in our wallets. The ancient silver denarius left an indelible mark on language, with its name echoing in the dinar and denar of nations across three continents, a 2,000-year-old legacy of a single word for money.

The Logic Engine's Secret: AI Doesn't Think, It Predicts

Modern AI generates remarkably logical text not through genuine reasoning, but as a sophisticated pattern-matching machine. Trained on vast datasets, it mimics the form of human logic by calculating the statistical probability of word sequences, constructing arguments it doesn't comprehend.