Oh wow, this is cool: an article in Scientific American about the Arecibo message, the first message purposely sent by humanity out into interstellar space. The piece is written by science writer Nadia Drake — the daughter of Frank Drake, who designed the message — and it digs into the details of how the whole thing came about.
I’ve somehow never read about the Arecibo message before. It was sent out from the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico on November 16, 1974 towards global cluster M13. The message was in binary and when properly decoded upon receipt, should look like this:
The drawing on the right is Frank Drake’s recently discovered first draft of the message.
Dad targeted a globular cluster of stars called Messier 13 (M13), or the Great Cluster in the constellation of Hercules, because it would conveniently be overhead at the time of the ceremony (nestled in a sinkhole, Arecibo’s giant dish was not fully steerable). In about 25,000 years, Dad’s message will reach M13 — or at least part of it, because the majority of the cluster’s thousands of stars will have moved out of the telescope’s beam by then. But anyone who’s around to detect the Arecibo transmission, and who figures out how to decode it, will have a blueprint telling them a lot about us: what we look like, which chemical elements and biomolecules make up our DNA, what our planetary system is and how many of us existed in 1974. Dad’s transmission concluded with a binary encoded representation of the Arecibo dish itself.
Btw, in addition to creating the Arecibo message, Frank Drake also designed the Drake equation (“a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy”), helped design the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, and generally kickstarted the whole SETI effort. (via @https://bsky.app/profile/astrokatie.com)
The Babylonian map of the world is the oldest map of the world, in the world. Written and inscribed on clay in Mesopotamia around 2,900-years-ago, it is, like so many cuneiform tablets, incomplete. However, Irving Finkel and a particularly gifted student of his — Edith Horsley — managed to locate a missing piece of the map, slot it back into the cuneiform tablet, and from there set us all on journey through the somewhat mythical landscape of Mesopotamia to find the final resting place of the ark. And yes we mean that ark, as in Noah’s ark. Although in the earlier Mesopotamian version of the flood story, the ark is built by Ziusudra.
Finkel could not possibly look more like a British Museum curator than he does.
Btw, I first heard about the earliest Mesopotamian version of the flood story in a mythology class I took in college. I’d spent a lot of my youth going to church but religion didn’t click for me and I was never a believer. Hearing that flood story clinched it for me — the Old Testament of the Christian bible is just as mythological as the Greek or Mesopotamian gods (everything is a remix) — and I’ve been solidly atheist ever since. (via open culture)
Vice President Kamala Harris has debuted her first ad for her presidential run and it’s a good one. First of all: Beyoncé. But also: “freedom” is a great theme for Harris. For too long Republicans have defined what that word means in America and now’s the time for Democrats to assert their vision. From the ad:
The freedom not just to get by but get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body. We choose a future where no child lives in poverty, where we can all afford health care, where no one is above the law.
I think a lot about this 2018 Rolling Stone interview with Pete Buttigieg (when he was still mayor of South Bend, Indiana) in which he offers his thoughts on recasting “concepts that conservatives have traditionally ‘owned’ — like freedom, family, and patriotism — in more progressive terms”.
You’ll hear me talk all the time about freedom. Because I think there is a failure on our side if we allow conservatives to monopolize the idea of freedom - especially now that they’ve produced an authoritarian president. But what actually gives people freedom in their lives? The most profound freedoms of my everyday existence have been safeguarded by progressive policies, mostly. The freedom to marry who I choose, for one, but also the freedom that comes with paved roads and stop lights. Freedom from some obscure regulation is so much more abstract. But that’s the freedom that conservatism has now come down to.
Or think about the idea of family, in the context of everyday life. It’s one thing to talk about family values as a theme, or a wedge — but what’s it actually like to have a family? Your family does better if you get a fair wage, if there’s good public education, if there’s good health care when you need it. These things intuitively make sense, but we’re out of practice talking about them.
I also think we need to talk about a different kind of patriotism: a fidelity to American greatness in its truest sense. You think about this as a local official, of course, but a truly great country is made of great communities. What makes a country great isn’t chauvinism. It’s the kinds of lives you enable people to lead. I think about wastewater management as freedom. If a resident of our city doesn’t have to give it a second thought, she’s freer.
Clean drinking water is freedom. Good public education is freedom. Universal healthcare is freedom. Fair wages are freedom. Policing by consent is freedom. Gun control is freedom. Fighting climate change is freedom. A non-punitive criminal justice system is freedom. Affirmative action is freedom. Decriminalizing poverty is freedom. Easy & secure voting is freedom. This is an idea of freedom I can get behind.
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
The Declaration of Independence stated our fledgling nation’s assertion that people are endowed “with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. It’s pretty clear which of the two parties’ interpretations of freedom hews closer to that assertion.
Members of the original cast of The Avengers (Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Jeremy Renner, and Mark Ruffalo) reunited to dub the movie in the Lakota language.
Mark Ruffalo and members of the initiative sit down with us to share the story of this amazing reunion and its very special cause. From the recording studio to the big screen, we explore this important cinematic milestone and celebrate the release that took over 15 months, 62 Lakota-Dakota language speakers, and the original Avengers team to come together and Assemble!
More details from the Lakota Times:
On June 14th, 2024, Disney plus will release the Avengers film that will be dubbed in Lakota. Cyril “Chuck” Archambault, Ray Taken Alive, Dallas Nelson, Lawrence Archambault along with the Lakota Reclamation Project, Grey Willow Studios, students from McLaughlin school, elders from the Standing Rock community and many others have all worked very hard together to complete this project.
A couple of years ago, Ray and Chuck talked about the idea of dubbing the Avengers movie. From there, Chuck spoke with Mark Ruffalo about the idea and Ruffalo said he will get back to them about it. Several months later, a meeting was set up with Marvel and Disney to discuss this idea. Not only did they approve of the project, but Marvel and Deluxe studios helped them through it.
From there, they were able to receive a grant to help with funding, within the budgets they made sure that the Elders would be the highest paid in the project.
My teen daughter doesn’t care for crosswords or the Spelling Bee, but she does try to play Connections every day. We were working on this one together a few days ago and when I suggested SNAIL GALAXY CYCLONE SUNFLOWER as a group, she said “I was thinking spirals but sunflowers are round”. Which prompted a discussion about the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio (which she’d covered in math class) and a search for videos that explained how the sequence pops up in nature and, specifically, sunflowers.
As beautiful as the sunflower is, isn’t it even lovelier knowing there is a deep mathematical order to it?
I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty.
First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees.
I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
Games, language, mathematics, the beauty of flowers, science, time spent together — Connections indeed.
I thought for sure that I’d previously written about the secret jelly packet & pickle-based system that chefs at the Waffle House use to “store” all of the orders that come in for food during service, but I can’t find it in the archive. But no matter — the Waffle House training video above runs us through their whole system, including a detailed explanation of their Magic Marker System, which involves zero actual Magic Markers and instead is about arranging condiment packets and other items on plates in a code:
Now let’s talk about our breakfast sandwiches. Just like omelettes, these sandwiches have the same four positions: ham, sausage, bacon, and plain. To mark a sandwich, place two pickle slices in the appropriate position. Here you can see I put two pickle slices in the number three position, which tells me this is a bacon sandwich. If I add a slice of cheese to the plate, I know this is a bacon cheese sandwich. To make this a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, I’ll add this right side up mayo packet to the right side of the plate.
Don’t let this mayo pack confuse you - as long as you see two pickles on the plate you know this is a sandwich. When marking a sandwich, this mayo packet and pickles means a sandwich with eggs. If a customer wanted the eggs on their sandwich to be scrambled instead of the standard over well egg, I’d move this mayo pack down to the bottom of the plate to show that the egg is scrambled.
That sounds pretty complicated and they’ve likely faced pressure to change the system over the years, but I bet it works really well in practice and cuts down on errors. I love stuff like this…seeing how different organizations manage their core processes, especially in non-conventional ways. See also Nightclub Hand Signals and The Quarryman’s Symphony. (thx, erik)
The other day while chatting on Discord, I paused to pick out an emoji to apply to a friend’s comment. I wanted to use a heart to show that I liked the comment, but I’d already used the red heart and wanted to add a little more flair. Usually I just pick a pink one arbitrarily, but in that moment, I was like, WTF do all these little hearts actually mean? Do they have official meanings? Am I using them wrong?
It’sacommonquestion, and the answer seems to essentially be: “No, there are no official meanings,” although according to Emojipedia the hearts do at least have official names: growing heart, beating heart, and revolving hearts (to choose the three that were least obvious to me).
The revolving hearts were the most confusing, in my opinion. Why are they revolving? According to The Pioneer Woman, they mean “falling in love, or deep affection.” That didn’t seem right, so I asked a few friends.
“Sending love?” my husband said. “I don’t know.”
“Love,” a friend said. “But specifically between you and the person you’re sending it to. It’s like a step up from ❤️.”
Another friend said something similar: “Like ❤️,” she wrote, “but 10% more girlie and romantic.”
I asked Jason. “I would say there’s a strong feeling of being intertwined,” he said. “Like, I wouldn’t send that to a friend. I don’t think I have ever received that particular emoji from anyone.”
“Ok, I’ve never used that particular one,” another friend echoed, “but I always use the two hearts 💕 instead of a red heart, because I think it’s cuter. I have no idea what 💞 means.”
Emojipedia leaves it open-ended in its 💞 emoji-descriptor: “Hearts revolving around one or more other hearts.” (Around even more hearts?) In a 2020 post, Emojipedia also acknowledged that “intrinsically each heart has no more coded meaning than what meets the eye.”
In every issue, the quarterly Buddhist magazine Tricycle publishes a winning haiku from its ongoing monthly haiku contest. The poem appears alongside a column written by the contest’s judge, poet and author Clark Strand. This season’s haiku-adjacent column includes the following bit, about one theory on the nature of haiku:
The Japanese haiku critic Kenkichi Yamamoto (1907–1988) believed that the best haiku strike a balance between humor and existential isolation. “Loneliness in life and the comical elements of life are two sides of the same coin,” he wrote. As a genre of literature, haiku thrives on the flip of that coin — the small element of uncertainty that challenges our ordinary understanding of the world.
I hadn’t realized there were such things as haiku critics (!). I also like the idea of loneliness and humor being related somehow.
Read the Spring 2024 winning haiku here. And enter the monthly contest here. (The next round must include the word “turnip.”)
Their codas could be orders of magnitude more ancient than Sanskrit. We don’t know how much meaning they convey, but we do know that they’ll be very difficult to decode. Project CETI’s scientists will need to observe the whales for years and achieve fundamental breakthroughs in AI. But if they’re successful, humans could be able to initiate a conversation with whales.
This would be a first-contact scenario involving two species that have lived side by side for ages. I wanted to imagine how it could unfold. I reached out to marine biologists, field scientists who specialize in whales, paleontologists, professors of animal-rights law, linguists, and philosophers. Assume that Project CETI works, I told them. Assume that we are able to communicate something of substance to the sperm whale civilization. What should we say?
One of the worries about whale/human communication is the potential harm a conversation might cause.
Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, a law professor at NYU who is advising Project CETI, told me that whatever we say, we must avoid harming the whales, and that we shouldn’t be too confident about our ability to predict the harms that a conversation could cause.
The sperm whales may not want to talk. They, like us, can be standoffish even toward members of their own species-and we are much more distant relations. Epochs have passed since our last common ancestor roamed the Earth. In the interim, we have pursued radically different, even alien, lifeways.
A team of three students were able to virtually “unroll” a 2000-year-old papyrus scroll that was carbonized during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Herculaneum, thereby winning the grand prize in the Vesuvius Challenge. These scrolls (there are hundreds of them) are little more than “lumps of carbonized ash”; this Wikipedia entry helpfully summarizes their fate:
Due to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, bundles of scrolls were carbonized by the intense heat of the pyroclastic flows. This intense parching took place over an extremely short period of time, in a room deprived of oxygen, resulting in the scrolls’ carbonization into compact and highly fragile blocks. They were then preserved by the layers of cement-like rock.
Using high-resolution CT scans of the scrolls, machine learning, and computer vision techniques, the team was able to read the text inside one of the scrolls without actually unrolling it. I am stunned by how much text they were able to recover from these blackened documents — take a look at this image:
There was one submission that stood out clearly from the rest. Working independently, each member of our team of papyrologists recovered more text from this submission than any other. Remarkably, the entry achieved the criteria we set when announcing the Vesuvius Challenge in March: 4 passages of 140 characters each, with at least 85% of characters recoverable. This was not a given: most of us on the organizing team assigned a less than 30% probability of success when we announced these criteria! And in addition, the submission includes another 11 (!) columns of text - more than 2000 characters total.
If you’re interested, it’s fascinating to read through the whole thing to see just how little they were working with compared to how much they were able to recover. And the best part is, all the contest submissions are open source, so researchers will be able to build each other’s successes. (via waxy.org)
A couple of weeks ago, Radiolab aired an episode about a puzzling object on a children’s poster of the solar system: a Venusian moon called Zoozve. Venus doesn’t have any moons and “Zoozve” didn’t show up on Google at all, so co-host Latif Nasser went on a bit of a mission to find out what the heck this object was. He talked to someone at NASA, the poster’s designer, and various astronomers and physicists, including the person who had discovered Zoozve (aka 2002 VE68).
So begins a tiny mystery that leads to a newly discovered kind of object in our solar system, one that is simultaneously a moon, but also not a moon, and one that waltzes its way into asking one of the most profound questions about our universe: How predictable is it, really? And what does that mean for our place in it?
By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education.
and:
Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: “The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction — how to teach himself. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.”
Somewhere along the line, someone combined Gerjuoy’s observation with Toffler’s phrasing to create, IMHO, a more insightful quote about the flexibility their future (and our present) requires.
Growing up in northern Wisconsin, we said “tennis shoes” or “tennies” most of the time (even though very little actual tennis was being played) and “gym shoes” less often. I hadn’t really heard of “sneakers” as a kid and never used it. (Shoes for sneaking? Huh?) My kids were born in NYC and they give me shit every time I tell them to put their tennies on. 🤷♂️
What do you call athletic shoes? Tennies? Sneakers? Kicks? Trainers? Gym shoes? Some other weird thing? (via @dens)
About ten years ago, after a long campaign by Navajo Nation member Manny Wheeler, Disney/Lucasfilm released the first Star Wars movie dubbed into the Navajo language. In this clip from the PBS series Native America, the Navajo version of Star Wars is shown at a drive-in in Arizona, with some of the voice actors who contributed to the dub in attendance. Some Navajo feel a strong connection to some of the themes in the movie:
The Force and the universe is all interconnected. When you put that in the Navajo language, especially for an elder to hear that, they’re going to just be thinking, like, yeah, of course. It’s not just a movie. That’s stuff we really believe.
From a series The Cut did called Deaf People Tell, a group of deaf people teach us how to swear and say bad words in sign language. I really liked the one for “bullshit”. Probably NSFW.
It’s a New York pastime to gripe that neighborhoods are invented and defined by real estate brokers, developers and other city gatekeepers. But the more interesting truth may be that they are also reinvented and reinforced, refracted through race and class, by us: by the air traffic controller who lives in Little Yemen, by the Manhattan community manager who’s sure his constituents live in East Harlem — and not “Upper Carnegie Hill” — and by the Brooklyn residents who decided to name a relatively flat piece of land Boerum Hill.
A name has power. It can foreshadow who will be moving in. By itself, it can conjure so much: gentrification, displacement, inequality, status. When we argue over names, or even invent new ones, we may be trying to exert some of that power — or lamenting that others have more power than we do.
We asked New Yorkers themselves to map their neighborhoods and to tell us what they call them. The result, while imperfect, is probably the most detailed map of the city’s neighborhoods ever compiled.
The article is interesting throughout:
Our map reveals two main kinds of divisions: sharp ones and fuzzy ones.
The fuzzy ones often reflect areas in transition or dispute, where there’s no consensus or where gentrification is rewriting boundaries in real time.
The sharp ones often reflect features of the landscape itself: wide avenues, highways, remnants of canals. When you cross the street, you know you’re in another neighborhood.
Next time I’m in NYC, I’m definitely going to Little Yemen for lunch.
In a piece about how English and North American robins (two unrelated species that don’t even share a biological genus or family) got their names, Robert Francis shares how some English birds were given people names…and some of them stuck.
During the 15th century, the English had an endearing practice of granting common human names to the birds that lived among them. Virtually every bird in that era had a name, and most of them, like Will Wagtail and Philip Sparrow have been long forgotten. Polly Parrot has stuck around, and Tom Tit and Jenny Wren, personable companions of the English countryside, are names still sometimes found in children’s rhymes. Other human names, however, have been incorporated so durably into the common names that still grace birds as to almost entirely obscure their origin. The Magpie, a loquacious black and white bird with a penchant for snatching shiny objects, once bore the simple name “pie,” probably coming from its Roman name, “pica.” The English named these birds Margaret, which was then abbreviated to Maggie, and finally left at Mag Pie.[2] The vocal, crow-like bird called Jackdaw was also once just a “daw” named “Jack.”
The English also gave their ubiquitous and beloved orange-bellied, orb-shaped, wren-sized bird a human name. The first recorded Anglo-Saxon name for the Eurasian Robin was ruddoc, meaning “little red one.” By the medieval period, its name evolved to redbreast (the more accurate term orange only entered the English language when the fruit of the same name reached Great Britain in the 16th century). The English chose the satisfyingly alliterative name Robert for the redbreast, which they then changed to the popular Tudor nickname Robin. Soon enough, the name Robin Redbreast became so identified with the bird that Redbreast was dropped because it seemed so redundant.
Last month we got a glimpse of the newest season of the Apple+ series For All Mankind (“Imagine a world where the global space race never ended.”) in the form of a teaser trailer that did not give a whole lot away. Well, a proper trailer has dropped and it looks like the gang will be colonizing Mars and harvesting precious metals from asteroids. as I wrote last month:
Is it just me or, if you tilt your head and squint, can you see For All Mankind as a prequel/origin story for The Expanse?
Ok, this is a little bit bonkers: HeyGen’s Video Translate tool will convert videos of people speaking into videos of them speaking one of several different languages (incl. English, Spanish, Hindi, and French) with matching mouth movements. Check out their brief demo of Marques Brownlee speaking Spanish & Tim Cook speaking Hindi or this video of a YouTuber trying it out:
The results are definitely in the category of “indistinguishable from magic”.
Obviously, I’m naming heatwaves to highlight this worsening climate problem and perhaps save lives by getting the public to focus on this weather threat. This year I’m naming major heatwaves after oil companies to shame them in the process and to identify culprits that are exacerbating these deadly systems.
And several more as needed. Here’s Walton’s criteria for choosing what constitutes a nameable heatwave (mirroring the scale for hurricanes):
CAT 3: A major level heatwave severe enough such that a few fatalities are reported. A city in a CAT 3 heat wave would be under a heat emergency for a few days. Many heat records would be either tied or broken.
A CAT3 or higher heatwave would be considered to be a major heatwave and would get a fossil fuel corporation name.
The highest category of heatwave is CAT5:
CAT 5. Catastrophic heat wave. Many all-time temperature records would be shattered with thousands of deaths reported. Remember the European heat wave of 2003 in which there were well in excess of 10,000 fatalities? This event would certainly fit my CAT 5 category.
The media should actually start using these more widely. (via @dens)
Scrabble is one of those games where pro/expert gameplay differs so much from amateur/novice gameplay that it might as well be a totally different game. In this entertaining recap of the finals of the 2023 Scrabble World Championships, former US champ Will Anderson explains how finalists David Eldar and Harshan Lamabadusuriya think and strategize throughout the best-of-seven series.
Gameplay aside, the thing that stood out for me is how many of the words played I’d just never heard of before. Like, at least 60% of them. Like I said, it’s just a completely different game at the expert level, with a shit-ton of memorization required. I don’t play Scrabble for this reason — because if you don’t have a bunch of two-letter words and Q,Z, & X words memorized and you’re playing against someone who does, it’s not fun. But it is fun to see two heavyweights of the game go at it on equal terms. (via peterme)
According to recent research from linguists Phillip Carter and Kristen D’Alessandro Merii, a new dialect of English is forming in South Florida. The dialect, distinct from Spanglish, is spoken English that borrows lexical and semantic rules translated from Spanish. Carter writes:
For example, we found people to use expressions such as “get down from the car” instead of “get out of the car.” This is based on the Spanish phrase “bajar del carro,” which translates, for speakers outside of Miami, as “get out of the car.” But “bajar” means “to get down,” so it makes sense that many Miamians think of “exiting” a car in terms of “getting down” and not “getting out.”
Locals often say “married with,” as in “Alex got married with Jos’e,” based on the Spanish “casarse con” — literally translated as “married with.” They’ll also say “make a party,” a literal translation of the Spanish “hacer una fiesta.”
We also found “semantic calques,” or loan translations of meaning. In Spanish, “carne,” which translates as “meat,” can refer to both all meat, or to beef, a specific kind of meat. We discovered local speakers saying “meat” to refer specifically to “beef” — as in, “I’ll have one meat empanada and two chicken empanadas.”
I particularly liked this one:
We found that some expressions were used only among the immigrant generation — for example, “throw a photo,” from “tirar una foto,” as a variation of “take a photo.”
Hand Talk sign language has been used by indigenous communities for thousands of years as a lingua franca between groups and tribes that didn’t share a common spoken language. Hand Talk is an endangered language — the US government tried to eradicate indigenous languages starting the late 1800s — but it’s still in use today.
This was fascinating. For example, as with all languages, Hand Talk vocabulary reveals how they thought about everyday concepts like time:
For example, let’s take the simple question: “How old are you?” First, there’s a single sign for “question.” So for a question about someone’s age, you’d use the motion for question with the motion for “winter”. How many winters are you? That’s what I ask. In PISL you measure months by moons, days by the sun. And to refer to different times of day, you would show hand placement according to the position of the sun in the sky. So this sign for morning, afternoon, or night.
Hand Talk was also one of the influences on ASL and the borrowing of vocabulary between the two language groups continues.
The term “culture wars” is used by many well-meaning people, including many progressive writers and activists I admire. It’s a convenient way to refer to a number of issues. But in this current political moment, I think it’s a highly misleading euphemism. What we are experiencing in America right now is an asymmetrical attack on basic freedoms — a fascist movement that thrives on targeting certain groups, erasing history, and spreading dangerous falsehoods through a vast media apparatus. To call this a “culture war” is to legitimize the contemporary GOP and its extremist counterparts as a coherent and authentic “culture” worthy of respect. This is a misuse of the concept of culture, creating a false equivalence between marginalized groups and those who would harm or eliminate them in a quest for ever more power.
Shetland Islanders, descendents of Jamaican immigrants living in London, and African Americans all tend to say “axe” or “aks” instead of “ask” when speaking. Linguist Geoff Lindsey traces the history of differing pronunciations of ask/aks from all the way back to the beginnings of written English up to the present day.
First, it’s important to understand that, as English goes, “ax” is a perfectly normal thing to have happened to a word like “ask.” Take the word “fish.” It started as “fisk,” with the same -sk ending that “ask” has. Over time, in some places people started saying “fisk” as “fiks,” while in others they started saying “fisk” as “fish.” After a while, “fish” won out over “fiks,” and here we are today. The same thing happened with “mash.” It started as “mask.” Later some people were saying “maks” and others were saying “mash.” “Mash” won.
With “ask,” some people started saying “aks,” and some started saying “ash.” But this time, it wasn’t “ash” that won out. Instead, for a while “aks” was doing pretty well. Even Chaucer used it in “The Canterbury Tales,” in lines such as this one: “Yow loveres axe I now this questioun.”
There is an element of chance in how words change over time, and we will never know why “aks” and “ash” lost out to “ask.” All we know is that the people whose English was designated the standard happened to be among those who said “ask” instead of “aks” - and the rest is history.
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