With old firearms, a powder charge that burned too slowly 'faisait long feu', made a long fire: the shot went off late or not at all, and missed. So the French idiom meant to fail, to fall flat, like a misfire. Its negative form, 'ne pas faire long feu', has since come to mean 'not to last long', through confusion with the image of a fire that quickly dies.
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.