• Pheonixtail@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    If you want to dive into that sort of thing i recomend looking into social constructivist theory, nuts to realise just how much of everything we live our lives by is really a product of people agreeing to do so rather than any struct objective measure.

  • CaptnSeraph@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Can we do this tomorrow? I have stuff to do on Wednesday but I feel a bit ill so… Can we make this twosday?

    • skillissuer@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      The reason vast majority of cultures has 7 day week is that lunar month has 28 days, so that it can be neatly divided into four seven day weeks. It was important for timekeeping and because hunter-gatherers could forage more easily during full moon nights

      • DAC Protogen@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        My gamer brain read “frag” instead of “forage”. Now I imagine primitive Quake players bunnyhopping through the forest on full moon nights to hunt for food. Help.

        • skillissuer@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          i mean this is not a massive stretch. i heard an account of (ww2?) soldiers using mortar for fishing: one team would shell river, and another team would collect stunned/dead fish safe distance downstream. sometimes civilians got too close but they weren’t particularly concerned about it

  • daniskarma@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    The only reason the sequence of symbols you wrote say what you wanted to say is because we all agree on what it says.

  • Ech@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Depends on how we’re framing it. We agreed on names of days and lengths of weeks based on our culture and tradition, but that’s not really what today “is”, though. What it “is” is the 171st rotation in the current revolution around the sun. No need to agree on anything there. That just is what it is.

    • emptyother@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      It is neat seeing our agreement on these words change over time. And seeing a few people complaining about words not being used in its original meaning, thinking language is static. And cursewords going from taboo to common usage.

      Did you know shark (most likely) comes from the dutch word schurk (meaning bad guy/villain/scoundrel)? Which is where Loan Shark comes from, not from the fish. And the fish was called Haye or Dogfish? At some point the english speaking people decided that the fish should be called “bad guys”. Meanwhile, here in Norway we kept both the words “skurk” and “hai” from the dutch, in its original meaning.

      I wish I found this so fascinating back when I was still in school and could have taken that path.