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> The true answer is that they aren't two different things but two expressions of one thing: electromagnetism.

Whether we call it electricity or magnetism is almost an artifact of how we measure it. Although the needle on an old-school analog voltmeter is a magnetic device...

I always liked the cover to Richard Lyon's "Understanding Digital Signal Processing". It's not specifically about E&M but the picture just lights the idea up for me:

https://books.google.com/books?id=UBU7Y2tpwWUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

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Why do things cook faster in the oven when the door is closed?

"Context" is like a room, or more accurately describing how it feels, an angle. When I look at my thoughts from a Swedish angle, I can describe them using Swedish words. When I look at them from an English angle, I use the words that belong there. They're simply stored in different mental places, or states, and jumping between them takes mental effort. I could try to speak a sentence alternating between Swedish and Norwegian words, but it would be difficult. Staying in place is not.

Interestingly, this context or angle hinges on the person I'm speaking to, and I know a few people who speak Norwegian and Swedish in just the same way as me, and with those I can switch back and forth - not on every word, but every sentence if I wish.

That's what I want to know is HOW do you never forget which language a word belongs to? How does the brain do that?

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No. Every language is a context, and switching context takes conscious effort. I sometimes forget a word in one language, but I never forget which language a word belongs to. I grew up speaking Swedish at home and Norwegian with friends. The languages are pretty similar, and Norwegian has many varied dialects, so being aware from the start that language is just a description of a thing, separate from the thing itself, may have helped.

But when you're translating your thoughts into words do you ever accidentally use the word from the wrong language in the middle of a sentence?

But people who are bilingual or trilingual don't suddenly start speaking Spanglish to English-only speakers or mixing three languages into one. You aren't just learning synonyms because otherwise you'd start getting confused about which words are English and which are Spanish, or whatever other language.

Of all the bilingual people I've talked to, they never really say a word from another language in an English sentence randomly or on accident. But many many times they have stopped midsentence because they can't think of the word in English, even though they know it in their native language.

That is one of the questions where you say, "that is just how it is.".

The true answer is that they aren't two different things but two expressions of one thing: electromagnetism. There is truly only one single force present, but if you look at it from one side it looks like electrical forces and fields and from the other side it looks like magnetic forces and fields. The sides are always perpendicular because you have to be perpendicularly looking to only see one aspect of the electromagnetic force and not the other. You can in fact look at it from a skewed angle and see both.

So I don't have a better answer than that for an ELI5 answer. The electric field is like looking at the electromagnetic force from the front and the magnetic force is like looking at it from the side. If you can see some of the front you aren't looking straight at the side and if you can see some of the side you aren't looking straight at the front. In our dimensional space the perspectives have to be perfectly perpendicular to only see one aspect at a time.

I think you are right. An umbrella is a useful tool. Uh sound vs you sound is what makes the shift.

I say eye-tem, not eee-tem for the word item. But it is still an eyeball or an emotion.

It'll blow your mind when you discover how words like umpire, apron & uncle were originally numpire, napon and nuncle; so a numpire, a napron and a nuncle.

I believe the process of how they became how they are today is called rebracketing.

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The rule is that “a” goes before a word starting with a consonant. And “an" goes before a word starting with a vowel.

BUT the rules follows the phonetic pronunciation NOT the spelling.

some examples with pronunciation in [brackets]

"a" + consonant (both in spelling and pronunciation)

• a cat [k]
• a dog [d]
• a purple onion [p]
• a buffalo [b]
• a big apple [b]

"a" + vowel that is pronounced like a consonant

• a European [ˌjʊɚ...] say: a juropean
• a one-legged man [ˈwan] say: a won-legged man
• a union [ˈjuːn.jən] say: a junion)

"an" + vowel (both in spelling and pronunciation)

• an apricot
• an egg
• an orbit
• an uprising

"an" before consonant that is pronounced like w vowel

• an honorable person [ˈɒnəɹəbl̩] say: an onorable person)
• an honest error [ˈɒnɪst] say: an onest error

Because it's pronounced ˈjʊə.ɹəp, the first sound is a soft j not one of the 5 vowels (a,e,i,o,u) and it's only the pronunciation, not the speelling that determines the choice of an/a

Ah I see. I was comparing the U sound to the I sound but i should have been comparing it to the Y sound. Thanks! That makes sense

There's a common exception to the "An for nouns beginning with vowels, A for nouns beginning with consonants" which is "if the first vowel makes a Y sound, treat is as a consonant."

Marijuana is a schedule 1 drug according to the DEA. That means it is considered to have no therapeutic use and a high potential for abuse and addiction. That is the most restricted category, even drugs like cocaine and fentanyl are not schedule 1 substances. Drugs in that group are the most restricted for scientists to study so in addition to all the other barriers keeping scientists from studying what they want there are a ton of government hoops to jump through. Marijuana was originally criminalized for culture war reasons and it is still a schedule 1 drug 100+ years later. There are also a bunch of fun laws like if you're a gun owner and you use marijuana, even in a state where it's legal, you're not allowed to own your guns anymore.