International Mother Language Day 21 February was announced by the UNESCO in 1999 to celebrate cultural diversity and to commemorate the “language martyr” experienced by students 1952 in Bangladesh. These students are now honoured by the encouragement of multiculturalism and the promotion of protective measures for endangered languages. It is hard to imagine the challenges faced by students who have…
Samuel F. B. Morse invented his eponymous ‘Morse code’ as a way to communicate via a series of dots and dashes. This elegant system revolutionised communications back in the 1800’s. Under the code, every letter in the English language – along with most punctuation marks and each number from zero through nine – was given a unique, corresponding set of…
World Braille Day celebrates every year on 4 January the birth of Louis Braille, inventor of the touch reading and writing system used by millions of blind and partially sighted people all over the globe. Braille is a system of reading and writing for blind persons in which raised dots, in a series of 6 dots paired up in 3…
Remote work / working from anywhere is more than just a trend or a temporary fix to the current coronavirus pandemic: Remote work provides the flexibility which is a core part of the 21st-century workplace and is going to become the new mainstream. Remote companies and remote working are the “future normal”.
World Freedom Day has been designated in 2001 by then US President George W. Bush to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall. The date is not so much about the wall itself though, but more about what it symbolised: the end of communism in both Central and Eastern Europe. This special day was created to celebrate the reunification of…
On October 29th, we celebrate the most important invention in human history: the Internet. In 1969, on that day the first Internet transmission ever had succeeded. While the Internet may not have been possible without a million other monumental inventions that came before it, it’s hard to find any other invention with such a monumental impact on mankind, having changed…
Do you see what I see? Languages don’t all have the same number of terms for colours. English has 11 basic colour words, while some languages have 12. Other languages lack many “colours” we know, while some cultures don’t use colours in the same way we do and rather distinguish colours by “hot” vs. “cold”, some by “wet” vs. “dry”,…
On National Dictionary Day on 16 October, America honours the birthday of Noah Webster, the word lover who thought Americans should have their own dictionary since all English-language dictionaries came from England. It’s a day to celebrate the power, practicality, and playfulness of language itself. There is indeed power in language, in the command of a broad vocabulary consisting of…