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Wondering Thread!
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Wondering Thread!
Wondering Thread!
Okay, I'm not entireley sure if this is gonna catch on, but I thought we could try it! Basically, if you have something you wonder about a lot, post it here. If it's a question, perhaps someone knows the answer, and if it's not, bring on the hypothetical and silly wonderings! I actually do have something I wonder about a lot and that is... what were the first playgrounds like?
submitted by WildWolf, age Almost 13!, She/Her
(April 3, 2024 - 10:23 pm)
(April 3, 2024 - 10:23 pm)
Apparently giant sandboxes.
I wonder why we drive on the parkway and park in the driveway.
(April 4, 2024 - 10:07 am)
Perhaps it's just that the parkway is a somehow park-related road, and the driveway is a place to drive where there normally wouldn't be one (if I had one, it would be in the middle of my yard) where people just like to park their cars.
(April 4, 2024 - 8:04 pm)
yes!! i actually know the answer (researched it for a project last year actually haha), and Seadragon's pretty much correct - the word parkway was around before cars were even invented, and it refered to a boulevard through (surprise, surprise) a park. so even though terms like parkway, highway, and freeway are pretty much used interchangeably, they do mean slightly different things - a parkway specifically refers to a landscaped highway.
and yeah, driveways were also around before cars - they originally refered to the paths carriages would drive on to reach the house.
the exact definition of these terms have shifted over the years as our needs and technology changed, so that's why you park on a driveway and drive on a parkway :D
(April 5, 2024 - 2:49 pm)
(April 4, 2024 - 10:36 am)
(April 4, 2024 - 1:32 pm)
I wonder why the plural of 'man' is 'men' and the plural of 'woman' is 'women' but the plural of 'human' isn't 'humen.'
(April 4, 2024 - 10:27 pm)
"human has nothing to do with the word man. human comes from the Latin adjective humanus, which is related to the Latin word homo, meaning human being. Both are related to the word humus, meaning earth, ground, since humans were thought to have come forth from the ground. (This is a common belief in different cultures. Compare God creating Adam from dust in the Bible.)
man, on the other hand, is a Germanic word. Its etymology isn't entirely clear, as far as I can see. Some apparently have tenuously related it to the Latin words above, but even then man has come to English though Proto-Germanic, and human has been taken directly from Latin, so there is no reason why the pluralisation should be similar."
if you look it up there are actually a shocking number of results :) basically, the "man" part is there in both of them coincedentally; there's really no relation
about the playground, I would assume rocks and plains and stuff, right? Wasn't playing a way to practice hunting/surviving when you're younger?
I didn't know about the park/driveway though; that's really interesting!! Thanks, pangolin!
(April 6, 2024 - 10:19 am)