25 Handy Words That Simply Don’t Exist In English

Approximately 375 million people speak English as their first language, in fact it’s the 3rd most commonly spoken language in the world (after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish). Interestingly enough it’s the number 1 second language used worldwide – which is why the total number of people who speak English, outnumber those of any other.

But whilst it’s the most widely spoken language, there’s still a few areas it falls down on (strange and bizarre punctuation rules aside). We look at 25 words that simply don’t exist in the English langauge (and yet after reading this list, you’ll wish they did!)

Source: So Bad So Good.

Hmm . . . What kind of ominous, doctored statistic can I make up? Did you know that twenty-four per cent of Facebook users have unwittingly divulged their credit-card information to third-party venders? Or that iPhone owners are more likely to suffer from thumb-stress-induced depression? Or that having an Android means you possess the gene for racism? True or not, you’ll post it, and fourteen of your friends will comment and repost it and feign concern about privacy issues and worry that they’re sad racists with carpal-tunnel syndrome, although they’ll stay online because they’re addicted and their lives are too humdrum for them to care about the protection thereof anyway.

Source: The New Yorker.

[P]erhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place.

Source: Boston.com.

Perhaps it is time again to rekindle my love for fiction, pun intended.

A recent AskReddit thread titled Throwaway time! What’s your secret that could literally ruin your life if it came out? got people creating temporary accounts, then confessing their deepest, darkest secrets. The results ranged from creepy-but-cute, to fascinating, to horrifying.

I hope to walk you through that gigantic thread, because there were so many weird confessions, and browsing the comments on Reddit is time-consuming. Consider this a highlight reel of car crashes, I guess. I’m your Virgil, guiding you through Hell and Purgatory. I’m not condoning any of this, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t fascinating.

Source: Slacktory.

Not for the prude. This “thread is a harrowing descent into the darkest reaches of the human soul.

Dewey’s woes reflect in large part the challenges faced by other big law firms throughout the country that are trying to grow in a slow economy populated by cost-conscious companies. While it may not be as extreme as in the case of Dewey, a widening divide in pay between senior lawyers and the junior ones who are responsible for much of the work is creating tensions at some firms. For many in the legal industry, Dewey’s turmoil is a sobering lesson on unchecked ambitions.

Source: NYTimes.

For the visually impaired community, the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 seemed at first like a disaster — the standard-bearer of a new generation of smartphones was based on touch screens that had no physical differentiation. It was a flat piece of glass. But soon enough, word started to spread: The iPhone came with a built-in accessibility feature. Still, members of the community were hesitant. 

But no more. For its fans and advocates in the visually-impaired community, the iPhone has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary developments since the invention of Braille. That the iPhone and its world of apps have transformed the lives of its visually impaired users may seem counter-intuitive – but their impact is striking.

Source: The Atlantic.

So much for bemoaning the lack of a tactile keyboard.

Vancouver, Canada is the only city in North America that provides a legal facility for drug addicts to push heroin and cocaine and other types of substances into their veins. It’s called InSite, and it’s both government-sanctioned and government-funded.

Located in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside—often called Canada’s poorest postal code—the supervised injection site opened as a 3-year experiment back in 2003 to curb the neighborhood’s high levels of disease spread through shared needles and death from overdose. Now, after nearly a decade of academic research, political debate, public scrutiny and a Canadian Supreme Court ruling last September that stated InSite should remain open indefinitely, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and other cities across the nation are contemplating opening their own injection facilities.

Source: The Awl.

After the necessary posing and hand shaking and I’m-excited-to-be-a-part-of-this-organization-isms, you’ll be escorted into the locker room and shown your new stoop. It will look identical to all other stoops. And until you retire, this will be the only room on the planet where you’re safe, and where your struggle is understood.
Your last name will be unceremoniously taped over your locker and you’ll be gripped once again with the feeling of uncertainty that comes with a new beginning. The NFL is a man’s world, and even when secure in the blossoming of one’s own manhood, the question is unavoidable: Am I man enough?

Source: BuzzFeed.

To get the baseband to listen to him, he had to override the commands it was getting from another part of the phone. He soldered a wire to the chip, held some voltage on it, and scrambled its code. The iPhone was now at his command. On his PC, he wrote a program that enabled the iPhone to work on any wireless carrier.

The next morning, Hotz stood in his parents’ kitchen and hit “Record” on a video camera set up to face him. He had unruly curls and wispy chin stubble, and spoke with a Jersey accent. “Hi, everyone, I’m geohot,” he said, referring to his online handle, then whisked an iPhone from his pocket. “This is the world’s first unlocked iPhone.”

Source: The New Yorker.