The animal is also you
You, the consciousness reading this that is successfully converting millions of stimuli with slightly different intensities into symbols or sounds and then extracting meaning from them, cohabit your body with an animal who is also you. That animal is a good girl/boy/pal who wants to be helpful and tries its best but can’t communicate in words with you the way I am doing here. It wants plenty of rest and sun and good food and a stimulating environment and when it feels good, you feel good, because it’s you. And when it feels bad because maybe you’re like young me and don’t know the animal is trying to tell you it needs exercise and you get confused and angry when the animal is grumpy and destructive, you feel bad, because the animal is also you.
Generous appreciation
Being generous with appreciation feels great and is a learned skill that you can dramatically improve at with practice. A simple, genuine aside of “I appreciated that you X, thanks!” can make both you and the other person feel good and make it more likely they will do similar things in the future. Appreciation isn’t a limited resource, so it’s not helpful to try to save it up for only when it really matters.
cologne
The scented oil cologne is a genericized trademark, named after the fragrance Eau de Cologne, first sold by Italian-German perfumier Giovanni Maria Farina in 1709. Farina’s perfume was citrusy and renowned for being consistently homogeneous. Its fame was such that it was referred to as aqua mirabilis (Latin for “miracle water”) among European nobility, and it cost six months of a clerk’s salary per bottle. When France conquered Cologne as part of the 1797 Treaty of Campo Formio, the free trade regime it imposed led to dozens of imitators selling knockoff Eau de Cologne springing up, prompting its genericization.
Farina named Eau de Cologne after his place of residence, the Free Imperial City of Cologne. Rather than a German name like Kölnisch Wasser (Köln is the name of the city in German), he gave it a French name because it was the lingua franca among European nobility at the time. The company he founded in 1709, Johann Maria Farina gegenüber dem Jülichs-Platz GmbH, still exists and manufactures cologne today.
The city of Cologne was founded around 50 CE as a Roman colony, named Colōnia Agrippina after the woman who supported its promotion from a military garrison, Nero’s mother Julia Agrippina. Ironically, in every language except Latin, over the millennia the “Agrippina” portion of the name was dropped, leaving just Colōnia/Cologne/Köln, Latin for “colony”.
The Latin word colōnia comes from colōnus, meaning colonist or farmer, which in turn comes from colō, meaning to cultivate or till. Colō has been reconstructed to descend from Proto-Indo-European kʷelh₁ some 6000 years ago, meaning to turn, revolve, or dwell. Other words that descend from kʷelh₁ include Greek τέλος (télos) and English wheel.
Learning how to behave in a new environment
Most of how people learn how to behave in a new environment doesn’t come from a catchall employee handbook or a carefully crafted set of core values. It comes from watching what behaviors people already in that environment model, and then imitating those. If you’re an established part of a community or team, you have much more influence on its vibes than you think through what behaviors you model.
numeral
I got nerdsniped by the development of the numerals we use last week. It’s difficult to find images of historical numerals! This is the best I was able to reconstruct, with the link between the Shang numerals and the Brahmi numerals only speculative:
Photo of a sheet of paper with a table of written depictions of historical numerals from 0 to 9, with the headings “Shang c. 8700”, “Brahmi c. 10100”, “c. 10600”, “Persian c. 11000”, “Andalusian c. 11400”, and “Typeset c. 11540”
(Dates are in HE for easier parsing across the 1 CE boundary.)
Even though the link between Shang and Brahmi is speculative, it’s startling how strong the link is between Shang and modern Chinese numerals.