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:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. 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
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. 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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[–] Zahille7@lemmy.world -2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Now you've got me thinking.

Did language evolve from writing, or did writing evolve from language?

[–] Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There are plenty of oral languages, where the writing only came after contact with missionaries. Māori, and the other Pacific languages, aboriginal etc. And as all other species have some form of oral language, but not written. I'd pretty safe saying that sounds and words long predated the written forms. Unless you know of written only languages that the pronunciation came later?

[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Writing from language.

A lot of other animals besides humans use vocalisations, and those vocalisations can have quite specific meanings. This makes them a form of communication and demonstrates that encoding meaning in sound is a phenomenon that develops quite readily in nature.

We can also see then that the history of language in humans is those vocalisations becoming increasingly complex and able to represent more numerous concepts and thoughts until they eventually become something we recognise as a full language.

Written language is a mechanism to encode spoken language, but it's spoken language which came first.

[–] thethirdobject@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

guess where the word "prehistoric" comes from ;)

also, non-human animals have language without writing.