Brian Powers

The Greatest Insults in History, Profanity, and Why We Say Pardon My French

If we define an insult as words or actions that cause offense to a person or group of people, we realize that the nature of an insult is generally subjective and the best insults are essentially impossible to determine. Still, despite these being my list of the best insults in history, I certainly hope that you are entertained and that you learn something.

How Many Words Will You Speak in a Lifetime?

Is there a multiverse beyond our universe? Will we ever discover life on other worlds? Is my dog happy on that farm up-state? These are some of the biggest questions the human race has, throughout the ages, struggled to answer. But perhaps the biggest, most important question of our time: How many words will each…
Read more

How Not to be a Jerk to Your Foreign Language Teacher – World Teachers’ Day

October 5th, is World Teachers’ Day. When I set out to write this I was really just looking to express my regrets about being part of the bullying of a foreign language teacher who came to my high school when I was at the worst of ages. I didn’t realize that there is such a…
Read more

10 Weird or Endangered Languages You’ve Never Heard Of

Sometimes it feels like we spend a lot of time talking about languages that everyone knows about. Your biggies. Your French, German, English, Korean etc. But if only a tiny fraction of the world’s languages make up for more than half of it’s population, we must be missing something. Amid these throngs of dominant state…
Read more

International Talk Like a Pirate Day: The Origins O’ Pirate Speak

Avast me hearties! September 19th be International Talk Like A Pirate Day! Talk Like a Pirate Day is a “parody holiday” on which everyone, everywhere, is instructed to, well, talk like a pirate. Go figure. However, it has taken the Internet by storm lately, and the population in general since it was created in 1995.…
Read more

Indigenous Siberia: the Chukchi Language

A few years ago I ended up composing this tiny little “article” about the Chukchi language and people. It was one of my first articles and it’s just about as God-awful as you’d expect. To show you just how awful, I’ve taken a screenshot of the article and published it here as an image…  …
Read more