In 2025 I’ve learned 18 whole things. I don’t know how I can fit them all in my brain!
- The beautiful year 2025 of the Gregorian calendar is the only perfect square–numbered year in my lifetime—presumably, unless science gets really good really fast. That’s probably the only perfect thing about 2025.
- The king of the Netherlands occasionally guest-pilots on KLM Cityhopper.
- Mozart originally listed Eine kleine Nachtmusik as having an extra movement.
- A torus is the surface of the shape, not its volume—which led me to realize that:
- The English circle and the Italian cerchio are false friends, at least in mathematical terms—the former being a curve, the latter a surface.
- Laguiole is not a brand of knives but a type of knife.
- Hippos can’t swim, or at least they can’t float.
- Cyprus is feminine in Italian, which I guess is obvious, but perhaps not obvious enough, so I had to write about it.
- The Italian babbagigi (and the Sicilian cabbasisi, a somewhat well-known literary term for, well, deez nuts) comes from the Arabic name for tiger nuts.
- Monte Somma was the precursor to Vesuvius.
- The Italian cucchiaio (and related Romance words for spoon) comes from the Latin cochlearium, possibly because it was originally a tool to eat snails (cochleae).
- What the word bidet means.
- Charles Ponzi was from Lugo, 15 km from where my entire family is from.
- Manhattan Murder Mystery was initially written as an early draft of Annie Hall.
- The BART Antioch extension uses different trains, and I feel the name eBART is a bit misleading, considering they’re diesel-powered
- Aquafaba as an egg-white replacement was discovered in 2014 and 2015.
- URLs can contain text fragments that will highlight the corresponding text on the page. I used this technique a few times in this post.
- Parola macedonia is the Italian equivalent of the English portmanteau. Love it.