this post was submitted on 02 Apr 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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- 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
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Sign language has puns. But the gestures are similar, rather than the sounds.
Sign language is fascinating because it works exactly like other languages. It has rhymes, again with similar gesture rather than sound. Some people stutter in sign; stuck in a repeated gesture.
This is further evidence for the theory that language is something inherent in human brains.
The capability for language is obviously inherent and no one has disputed that for 70 years, the question is whether it's domain specific like the generativists claim or domain general like the functionalists claim.
Where else would it be? The mouth?
There was a competing theory that language was a technology that we developed and therefore had to learn rather than being innate.
We tortured a whole bunch of apes in the 70s & 80s trying to teach them language when it was always an exclusive ability of humans.
( I know that chimps could do sign language and stuff, but they never developed language; only able to express simple desires and emotions that they were well capable of without doing sign. And yes, Koko the gorilla's ability was mostly a stage act. I'm sorry. )
Language isn't entirely exclusive to humans. Some animals are linguistic geniuses and can pick up the basics. Kanzi the bonobo did a lot better than Koko and Nim. I don't think the language acquisition device is a requirement to use language, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier and enables much greater complexity in language.
And of course, language is now an ability humans share with large language models, which do even better than Kanzi at using language.
Like it was not just invented by a generic computation machine called the human brain, multiple times in different locations. Its more fundamental than that.