It’s Cow Appreciation Day.
I live in Wisconsin, we talk about cows here all the time.
But this story I think would be news to a lot of people even here: there was a report in 2006 from the BBC with this headline: “Cows also ‘have regional accents.’”
The story starts with a group of farmers in Somerset, England, who said that they had noticed that cows from different herds seemed to moo differently, almost like they had accents.
One said his cows “definitely moo with a Somerset drawl.”
So the BBC article turned to an expert: John Wells, Professor of Phonetics at the University of London.
When asked whether cows had accents, Wells pointed toward birds.
He said that different members of the same species might chirp differently in different parts of the country, and that quote “this could also be true of cows.”
As the story spread to other news outlets, that phrase “could also be true” became “was also true.”
Headline after headline said that cows did have accents, as studied by the University of London and reported by the BBC!
According to the blog Language Log, Professor Wells said that his answer was actually more along the lines of “this is probably not true, but we can’t also rule it out.”
He said he’d been contacted by a cheese maker and asked about the possibility of regional differences in mooing, possibly as a way to help get some media attention for their products.
So the best we can say is that we really don’t know whether cows have regional accents, and if you want to know for sure, you’ll probably need to run some kind of experiment.
Time moves on, as well all know, and now there’s a clock that moves right along with it.
Solstice 2.0 is a kinetic clock from designer Matt Gilbert.
Not only do the hour and minute hands move as time passes, but over a 12 hour cycle, the frame of the clock changes shape, sort of like how a flower opens and closes.
Or you can hit a button and watch the whole thing happen in like a minute.
Cows also ‘have regional accents’ (BBC)
It’s always silly season in the (BBC) science section (Language Log)
Mesmerizing Kinetic Clock Expands and Contracts With the Passage of Time (My Modern Met)
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