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People Are Just Learning The Difference Between "Grey" And "Gray" From A Viral Tweet

People Are Just Learning The Difference Between "Grey" And "Gray" From A Viral Tweet

Buzz Feed3 days ago
It all started with this tweet from @thoka_2 asking people one simple question:
What is the difference between "gray" and "grey?"
Luckily, Merriam-Webster stepped in to explain things:
Yeah, it's a USA vs. world thing.
Some people were thankful for clearing up this confusion.
Other people, "true word enojoyers" to be exact, said they knew it all along.
And then you had the crowd that doesn't care because they use both.
A bunch of people in the replies explained that they consider "gray" to be a name and "grey" to be the color.
You have the people bringing up that this is the same rule for the words "color" vs. "colour."
And this person asked the question: "I need help understanding how the letter e makes the sound ay. Do they pronounce it differently too?"
Laastly, there were the usual comments roasting Americans:
"It's ridiculous how the U.S has to be different with literally everything."
Anyway, another day, another lesson learned because of the... dictionary. Thank you, Merriam-Webster!
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Emancipation Day talk to highlight Haldimand's Black history
Emancipation Day talk to highlight Haldimand's Black history

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Emancipation Day talk to highlight Haldimand's Black history

Free on Friday? Heritage Haldimand invites the public to an Emancipation Day gathering that explores Haldimand County's ties to the Underground Railroad. Emancipation Day refers to the declaration of the end of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. In the United States, some African-Americans fleeing slavery took refuge in Canfield, a hamlet in Haldimand where Black and European settlers lived harmoniously, according to local historian Sylvia Weaver. 'Canfield was a special place,' Weaver told The Spectator in an earlier interview. She described how Black, Scottish and Irish inhabitants 'worked side by side' to clear the land. 'They lived together, went to school together, went to church together,' Weaver said. 'They were all equal and they got along.' The story of one of Ontario's oldest Black settlements is told in ' Canfield Roots, ' a documentary by Haldimand filmmaker Graeme Bachiu. Friday's free Emancipation Day event runs from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Canfield Community Hall at 50 Talbot Rd. The centrepiece of the program is a talk by historian Rochelle Bush, a descendant of Samuel Cooper, the first Black settler to make Haldimand his new home. Bush will tell stories of the Cooper and Street families, some of whom are buried in a historic cemetery in Canfield for Haldimand's earliest Black settlers. In an earlier interview, Bush said the African-Americans who came north to Canfield were authors of their own liberation and should be referred to as 'freedom seekers' rather than runaway or escaped slaves. 'They were self-emancipated (and) found their way to British soil, where they could find freedom,' Bush said. Haldimand's fourth annual Emancipation Day celebration 'serves as an opportunity to reflect on the history of slavery in Canada, acknowledge the contributions of Black Canadians and address ongoing systemic anti-Black racism,' the county said in a press release. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .

The Birth of the Attention Economy
The Birth of the Attention Economy

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timea day ago

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The Birth of the Attention Economy

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic 's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Early in the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. announced in The Atlantic that the necessities of life had been reduced to two things: bread and the newspaper. Trying to keep up with what Holmes called the 'excitements of the time,' civilians lived their days newspaper to newspaper, hanging on the latest reports. Reading anything else felt beside the point. The newspaper was an inescapable force, Holmes wrote; it ruled by 'divine right of its telegraphic dispatches.' Holmes didn't think he was describing some permanent modern condition—information dependency as a way of life. The newspaper's reign would end with the war, he thought. And when it did, he and others could return to more high-minded literary pursuits—such as the book by an 'illustrious author' that he'd put down when hostilities broke out. Nearly 40 years after Holmes wrote those words, newspapers were still on the march. Writing in 1900, Arthur Reed Kimball warned in The Atlantic of an ' Invasion of Journalism,' as newspapers' volume and influence grew only more intense. Their readers' intellect, Kimball argued, had been diminished. Coarse language was corrupting speech and writing, and miscellaneous news was making miscellaneous minds. The newspaper-ification of the American mind was complete. The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century created the first true attention economy—an endless churn of spectacle and sensation that remade how Americans engaged with the world. Although bound by the physical limits of print, early newspaper readers' habits were our habits: People craved novelty, skimmed for the latest, let their attention dart from story to story. And with the onset of this new way of being came its first critics. In our current moment, when readers need to be persuaded to read an article before they post about it online, 19th-century harrumphs over the risks of newspaper reading seem quaint. Each new technology since the newspaper—film, radio, television, computers, the internet, search engines, social media, artificial intelligence—has sparked the same anxieties about how our minds and souls will be changed. Mostly, we've endured. But these anxieties have always hinted at the possibility that one day, we'll reach the endgame—the point at which words and the work of the mind will have become redundant. Worries over journalism's invasive qualities are as old as the modern daily newspaper. In New York, where the American variant first took shape in the 1830s, enterprising editors found a formula for success; they covered fires, murders, swindles, scandals, steamboat explosions, and other acts in the city's daily circus. As James Gordon Bennett Sr., the editor of the New York Herald and the great pioneer of the cheap daily, said, the mission was 'to startle or amuse.' Small in size and packed with tiny type, the papers themselves didn't look particularly amusing, but the newsboys selling them in the street were startling enough. Even if you didn't buy a paper, a boy in rags was going to yell its contents at you. These cheap newspapers had relatively modest urban circulations, but they suggested a new mode of living, an acceleration of time rooted in an expectation of constant novelty. Henry David Thoreau and other contrarians saw the implications and counseled the careful conservation of attention. 'We should treat our minds,' Thoreau wrote in an essay posthumously published in The Atlantic, 'that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.' This included newspapers. 'Read not the Times,' he urged. 'Read the Eternities.' But the problem was only getting worse. The Eternities were steadily losing ground to the Times—and to the Posts, the Standards, the Gazettes, the Worlds, and the Examiners. In the last third of the 19th century, the volume of printed publications grew exponentially. Even as more 'serious' newspapers such as the New-York Tribune entered the marketplace, the cheap daily continued to sell thousands of copies each day. Newspapers, aided by faster methods of typesetting and by cheaper printing, became twice-daily behemoths, with Sunday editions that could be biblical in length. A British observer marveled at the turn of the century that Americans, 'the busiest people in the world,' had so much time to read each day. American commentators of high and furrowed brow worried less that newspapers were being left unread and more that they were actually being devoured. The evidence was everywhere—in snappier sermons on Sundays, in direct and terse orations at colleges, in colloquial expressions in everyday usage, in the declining influence of certain journals and magazines (including The Atlantic). If I may apply what Kimball deplored as 'newspaper directness,' people seemed to be getting dumber. Those who were reared on slop and swill wanted ever more slop and swill—and the newspapers were all too ready to administer twice-daily feedings. Writing in The Atlantic in 1891 on the subject of ' Journalism and Literature,' William James Stillman saw a broad and 'devastating influence of the daily paper' on Americans' 'mental development.' No less grave were the political implications of a populace marinating in half-truths, seeking the general confirmation of what it already believed. In such a market, journalists and their papers had an incentive to perpetuate falsehoods. Was all of this hand-wringing a little too much? 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Chatbots, meanwhile, can as readily make our emails sound like Hemingway as they can instruct us on how to perform devil worship and self-mutilation. Thoreau may have never divined the possibility of artificial intelligence, but he did fear minds smoothed out by triviality and ease. He imagined the intellect as a road being paved over—' macadamized,' in 19th-century parlance—'its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over.' 'If I am to be a thoroughfare,' Thoreau wrote, 'I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers.'

Data Shows That Young Women Are Just as Lonely as Men
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timea day ago

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A few years ago, my mom and I had a blowout fight. I can't recall what sparked the argument, but what I do remember is lying on the bathroom floor and sobbing as I scanned my texts for someone to reach out to who could keep me distracted from all the sadness. In my phone were the names of dozens of girls I met during my time at college, when I was rotating through late-night clubbing, brunches, and concerts in an attempt to get closer to people I hoped would one day be bridesmaids at my wedding. But truthfully? These friendships were superficial—nothing like what I watched and coveted in the TV show Girls. I couldn't rely on them during a panic attack. And if you can't call a friend at 10 p.m. on a weekday when the snot coming out of your nose has made you unintelligible, are they even a friend? I am a successful 21-year-old who is a published journalist and works a good, degree-aligned job. I live happily in New York City. I work out, love nature, and have a great boyfriend. 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Not only are women alarmed that the men in our lives are friendless, but it appears we feel responsible for helping them feel less alone. In pointing to a real problem, this media coverage glosses over another issue. Women's struggles with loneliness can be just as if not more severe than men's, but female isolation is rarely the topic of think pieces or trend stories. Are women okay? Some of us aren't, but when we're not occupied with 'mankeeping,' it's up to us to mitigate our own social anxiety. 'Women take on an especially high level of pressure and urgency to feel a deep connective tissue in a friendship,' Alyssa Petersel, LMSW, CEO of the therapist-match platform MyWellbeing, tells me in an interview. 'Women tend to view loneliness as a personal failure, but men, broadly speaking, are more likely to externalize the feeling (what's wrong with other people?) or not recognize it at all.' 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Reclusive and brilliant writers like Emily Dickinson or Emily Brontë described their own isolation at a time when women often couldn't work outside the home, gain a university education, or own property. Instead of going out to a tavern with a friend (unheard of) or bonding with coworkers, most of us could be found taking care of (ahem, 'mankeeping'?) our husbands by tending to their meals, trousers, and mood swings. In the process, we learned how to hide behind the mask of a seemingly perfect life—the magna cum laude college honors, say, or the beautiful photos on social media—which is one reason female loneliness hasn't seemed like an epidemic. The media, our partners and families, and the broader culture rarely see cause for concern or theorize about how to enhance our lackluster social lives. And so we are left to forge ahead on our own. Despite my efforts, I have struggled to tolerate superficial initial connections that (I assume) would slowly evolve into the close-knit, know-everything-about-your-life bonds I've seen and envied on TV. I don't want to talk about the merits of a new facial salon downtown or what's worth getting at the Alo Yoga sale, and so I don't even try. Still, I'm not okay with being a recluse. New York's beauty lies in the fact that you can find everyone here, and it stings not to have people tuned to my frequency. I have found a solution to all this, however, and it's fittingly retro. Bella and I became pen pals in 2020, at the age of 17, as part of Rachel Syme's Penpalooza letter-writing program. At its peak, the exchange had 10,000 members from over 75 different countries. Some pairings lasted for only a letter or two and others, like ours, are still ongoing. While I long for in-person friendships, as of right now, this long-distance platonic confidante knows my heart better than any of my lackluster college connections. Bella is a month older than me and also a journalist. In our early letters, when she was living in Florida, I used my best stationery to tell her about college applications, nature walks, and Covid-era existential crises. She wrote to me about the lake outside her window and the independent magazine she helmed. Bella lives in Spain now. We've only met once IRL. We can't share the joys of post-work drinks, trips to bookstores, or getaways to the beach on the Q train. At first, because of the distance, I didn't want to burden her in darker moments, like that post-fight meltdown on the bathroom floor. Week after week though, I felt giddy when running to my mailbox. Emily Dickinson lived a solitary life. Letter writing was also great joy for her—maybe because it let her express things she could never say out loud. 'This is an ode to all the girls we've been together,' Bella wrote in a card after I moved in with my boyfriend, accompanied by roses. The gesture made it feel as if she were in the apartment with us. So, in the tradition of deep and thoughtful long-distance correspondences between women who feel like they were born in the wrong century, I have come to realize true friendship doesn't require proximity. While the digital realm can be hazardous for isolated young men who stumble onto the manosphere, for lonely women like me, it's still a lifeline. Meeting Bella taught me that sometimes the best platonic connections live over 3,500 miles away but will still celebrate your wins, offer clarifying pushback when you're being stupid, and meet every new version of you with open arms. So while the media may never obsess over the fate of lonely letter-writing girls like me, thanks to modern technology, old-fashioned modes of correspondence, and a hefty dose of female resilience, there's still hope for us.

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