Best Of MetaFilter

Detail from Thomas Dolby album The Golden Age of Wireless

She BLINDED me, with one of these several distinct, though interrelated, things! biogeo breaks down what we mean when we say "science."

via antigonejournal.com, The Linear B postcard written by John Chadwick to Michael Ventris, digitised by the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

The reviews are in: "A fascinating story well told. Truly the Beat of the Web." chavenet posted the excellent article Cracking the Code of Linear B by Theodore Nash, chock full of details.

Art by Ron Mader, via Flickr

Don't limit yourself to just one language when using slang! Be multi-lingual via gwint's sharing of the untranslatable.co site and bask in the warm glow of being a language weltenbummler!

antarctica research base by ▓▒░ TORLEY ░▒▓ (cc by-sa)

Mefi member chariot pulled by cassowaries posted How Scientists Working in Antarctica Inadvertently Developed a New Accent. A 2019 study of scientists over-wintering in Antarctica revealed subtle but measurable changes in the participants’ speech.

McMansion by pasa47 (cc by)

Hello! Professional architectural historian checking in here ... Preserver addresses Mchelly's question about "McMansion" as architectural nomenclature.

cubby posted The Language You Cry In, "an amazing scholarly detective story that searches for —and finds— meaningful links between African Americans and their ancestral past. It bridges hundreds of years and thousands of miles from the Gullah people of present-day Georgia back to 18th century Sierra Leone."

Illustration by Toby Morris via The Spinoff

Etrigan has posted The Side Eye: The Stink A, linking to The Spinoff's really well-done and fascinating infographic on "the glitchy macron" that highlights how font decisions and usage can have an outsized impact on non-Anglo populations.

oed 008 by freeformkatia (cc by-nc-nd)

Everything you didn't know you wanted to know about "countersink": xueexueg drills down on the etymology.

Photo by Enis Can Ceyhan on Unsplash

"Language justice is critically important for health care, legal services, workplace safety, and education": a great member-sponsored post and interesting thread from jessamyn. Sponsored posts are helping with the current, vital fundraising effort, and you can follow these posts on the blue here. (Also, btw: What's metafilter's second language?)

A slightly belated congratulations to MeFi's own Languagehat on the twentieth anniversary of his blog.

LBJ by Michael C Clark (cc by)

In Ask Metafilter, "Diseases can be idiopathic. Archaeological artefacts can be for ritual purposes. What are some other technical-sounding terms from other fields that means 'we're really not sure'?"

Tribute to Signe Brander - Explored by Poupetta

the umlaut is probably the least threatening of the diacritic marks ... Kattullus on why Finnish-language brandnames appeal to anglophone marketers.

¿ by Brandon Giesbrecht (cc by)

In Ask Metafilter, true wants to know what mis-gendered nouns sound like to bilingual people.

IMG_1697 by FrancescaV.com (cc by)

Recently on Mefi, people and places around the world, enchanting, mysterious and magnetic:

40 years of Shenzhen, from market village to SEZ

Breaking the Ice, rare Icelandic funk- and soul-inspired music

Central Station, stories from cattle stations in the Australian outback

Georgia Has a Coast? Photos by drone of the Georgia coast that fills his soul

Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran: looking at the lives of women during the Qajar dynasty (1796-1925)

La Scarzuola: deep in Italy, one man’s surrealist mini-city sleeps

Arundhati Roy on the politics of language and translation in India

Beyond 'Florida Man': The problem with writing about Florida

Figures In The Stars: comparing 28 different sky cultures

#81 Signal by Trevor King 66 (cc by)

Great comment from pemberkins about what botanists mean when they talk about "invasive" species (and social concerns about the terms) in the Giant Hogweed discussion.