this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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That is not how Chinese writing works; characters represent morphemes, which are smaller than words. There are tens of thousands of words required for proficiency in a language, but only a few thousand required symbols for proficiency in writing Chinese. ("Words" here also counts different inflections of a single stem word as the same )
Almost all writing that we know of started out with pictures, which became pictograms (where there was a standard way of drawing a picture to represent something) then logograms (where the pictures stopped having to be recognisable).
Look into Sumerian cuneiform and the evolution of some of the symbols to see this in action; it's fascinating. This writing system then became partially syllabic, where symbols could also stand for the sound of the thing they originally represented, which is again a common way for writing systems to evolve.
The exceptions are things like Korean, which was invented from scratch: but not independently.
The chinese kinda did just make a character for each word though.
Modern chinese uses plenty of words with multiple characters but Old chinese didn't really. So character = word was much closer to the truth around the time of the oracle bone inscriptions.
OK, but if we're talking about origins then the Latin script ultimately descends from Egyptian hieroglyphics, which were also originally pictographic, hence 1:1 symbol:word (but evolved and so were much more complicated than just pictographs when they stopped being used)
At it's origins, the Latin script was an alphabet, not 1:1 symbol to word.
You have to go back through a chain of different scripts for different languages from different cultures that influenced it to get to heiroglyphs.
Chinese characters were logograms invented for Chinese and are logograms used for Chinese today. At their origin they were pretty much symbol = word and it mostly still is.
Logograms like Chinese characters are not 1:1 symbol to word; they stand for morphemes, not words. Some words are morphemes, but most words consist of more than one.
Chinese script evolved from a pictographic script, just as the Latin script evolved from a pictographic script. You have to go through a chain in either case.