When Hollywood turned to talkies, it created a not-quite-British, not-quite-American style of speaking that has all but disappeared.

No one should be surprised that the eccentricities of “the English” never became a thing, of course. We do not tend to confuse “The English” with “speakers of English” for the same reason that there is no common-sense idiom about how their many words for water are derived from centuries as a seagoing empire based on a rainy island. They do not become a they because they are us. [...] One interesting thing is how boring the answer to the underlying question is. On the one hand, people who live in the Arctic—and whose languages developed in that environment—will naturally have more sophisticated and nuanced and complex language for describing their environment, exactly as you’d expect them to. No one really denies that they tend to, even if this fact isn’t easily grasped by counting words. But exoticizing Eskimos is also a function of ignorance, conjecture, and projection. “Eskimos Have Fifty Words for Snow” is an amazing phrase, because every word in it is wrong. But reversing it—announcing proudly that they don’t—only replicates that wrongness; you can’t say no to a bad question and be right. [...] What’s fascinating to me about actually reading Whorf’s work—after working my way debunkers who gesture at his ignorance as disqualifying—is how simple the point he was trying to make actually was: that ignorance is, itself, a pathway towards new knowledge. Precisely because other languages show us things we didn’t know—and didn’t know we didn’t know—we can learn new things by engaging with that ignorance. What, for example, might an Inuktitut know about a world that distinguishes between aput, qana, piqsirpoq, or qimuqsuq that an America won’t know about “snow”? To translate “aput” into “snow on the ground” doesn’t solve the problem, it only buries it under the illusion of comprehension; better to ask, he says, what it is that isn’t being translated.

The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived.

"There are many terms which refer to a state of relating to or pertaining to a certain thing or category of things. Instead of using a phrase such as 'pertaining to buttercups', you can substitute the adjective 'ranunculaceous'. Using the admittedly invented phrase 'adjectives of relation', I have compiled 842 such terms."

"The NATO phonetic alphabet, more formally the international radiotelephony spelling alphabet, is the most widely used spelling alphabet. ... The paramount reason is to ensure intelligibility of voice signals over radio links.

In case you were wondering, the prefix for 19 is "decennov."

A language based on whistling confined to a small island. Has a vocabulary of over 4,000 words and is being taught in schools to prevent its extinction.