There's a war raging on the internet over how you pronounce emu. Americans tend to pronounce the bird's name as, ee-moo, and National Public Radio declared it an acceptable pronunciation. However, Australians did not take kindly to the action, as they pronounce it ee-mew. It's the difference in the words moot and mute. The Guardian stepped into the middle to declare both wrong. The Portuguese word "ema" was originally used to refer to a cassowary, and may be based on an Arabic word meaning "big bird". The word was likely brought to Australasia by early colonial explorers. Nick Enfield, a professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney, said: "This is pretty typical of English which is just absolutely chock-full of words that are borrowed from languages from all over the world. We mangle it to a more comfortable pronunciation for our own language and, you know, then just takes off."
Lockdown life
"My daughters three children have been very good at finding things to keep themselves amused during lockdown," writes Lynn Patton. "At the moment there are three jars around the house each containing ants carefully collected by its respective owner. All was well until yesterday when there was great commotion, crying and finger pointing. Pre-schooler maintains big sister had stolen 2 of his ants!"