Paris's Place de Grève, on the banks of the Seine, was named after the 'grève', a shore of sand and gravel. Jobless workers gathered there hoping to be hired, so 'être en grève' meant waiting for work. In the 19th century the phrase took on its modern sense of a collective work stoppage. The square, also a site of public executions, became the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville in 1803.
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.