Couldn’t agree more, children’s shows should absolutely be about peeling away the thin veneer of sanity that’s all there is protecting us from the gargling, writhing chaos and madness that lies in the darkness beyond.

It builds character.

You, me and every western philosopher for the last few hundred years all want an answer to this but as far as I know, the short answer is no - you can’t empirically prove anything exists outside of your own thoughts.

However, unless you particularly enjoy trying to answer that question, it’s simply more practical to accept as a fact, that your senses are telling the truth when they tell you something is real.

It’s an axiom, but axioms are helpful for allowing us to get on with living when we would otherwise just get stuck in a pointless loop of asking unanswerable questions.

That said, if you do enjoy the challenge of trying to answer these sorts of questions, you could probably start with Rene Descartes’ - Discourse on the Method. In that, Descartes kicks this whole topic off by asking “what happens if I systematically deconstruct everything I know to be real?” and eventually comes to the conclusion that yes, everything outside of our minds can be doubted but the one, irrefutable fact that holds up under any amount of scepticism, is that “if I can think, I exist”.

This is a pretty digestible article about the importance of the discovery of “cogito, ergo sum”/“I think, therefore I am”.

Exactly! I mean, some people (looking at you downvoters) learnt that during their education. But I (we?) didn’t, and this has been a really interesting find for me.

I genuinely love learning about linguistic weirdness, I just don’t know a lot about it. Or have many occasions to learn.

I can only imagine they’re downvoting because they’ve had a better education than me, or paid more attention in class, or read the Wikipedia entry ten minutes before me.

I was just learning about this today in response to this post! I had no idea that the definition of a vowel is based on what sound you actually make, rather than it having anything to do with what you write.

It’s kind of weird that it’s not taught that way in schools. Like, you’re just told a/e/I/o/u are the vowels and left to get on with it. Seems to me that could just be changed to “by the way it’s a/e/I/o/u/y/w, off you go”.

Also by/dry/cry/pry etc. There are loads if you exclude y as a vowel.

If you believe the internet, then “bliss” made quite a bit initially.

This is the pic windows XP wishes it had on release