In 1759, in the middle of the Seven Years' War, Étienne de Silhouette became France's finance minister. He imposed savings and new taxes so unpopular that he was dismissed after eight months. 'À la Silhouette' came to describe anything done on the cheap, quickly and sketchily. According to the most common explanation, his name thus passed to cheap portraits reduced to the outline of a shadow.
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.