You've been in the situation before - you're reading a blog post, a Tweet, a Facebook post, or are engaging in a furious comment war, and something comes up that makes you ask things like:
What is that?
What does that even mean?
I've never heard of this before - WTF?
What is this word?
You're talking about the Manicheans, but how are they related to the Zoroastrians, again?
All sorts of questions like this come up in the context of conversation, whether in person or on the internet. Is somebody saying something you don't understand? Are they using terms or a way of thinking that's unfamiliar to you? Do you feel puzzled when you see a word, and all you can think to type in response is:
Once upon a time, it could have taken hours of research to answer these questions yourself - where would you even start to look? Fortunately, in the olden days, a phone call to the reference desk at your local library, or when they were closed, perhaps to the local bar's trivia team, could (relatively) quickly and easily answer such burning questions. In the 70s and 80s, my husband and his family would call the Berkeley Public Library during the day, and after library closing hours, they'd call the bartender at the King's X pub in Oakland, California, for answers to just about anything - he would put the questions to the pub's trivia champion patrons. But then along came the internet, and the importance and relevance of these functions at these institutions have faded. Along with them, the knowledge of where to go to find answers to questions that seem too strange or difficult to answer seems to have faded, as well.
The next time you're wondering about what something means, all you have to do is open a search engine (or use your browser's URL bar) and type in a question or some key words to help you find the answers. For example, typing "What is Urdu?" into Google brings up the following definition as the first result:
Urdu
ˈo͝ordo͞o,ˈərdo͞o/
noun
- a form of Hindustani written in Persian script, with many loanwords from Persian and Arabic. It is an official language of Pakistan and is widely used in India and elsewhere.
You of course, don't have to use Google. There's plenty of search engines out there - Bing is pretty well known and the number two search engine out there, people are still using Yahoo! and Ask (I'm old enough to remember the launch of AskJeeves, which reminds me that I should really rewatch Jeeves & Wooster sometime soon). DuckDuckGo suggests it allows you to search without being tracked, which is nice if you care about privacy.
I know it sounds far-fetched - that you can actually use the power of the mighty internet not only to spend your day watching adorable videos of cats, puppies, and babies - and this is a truly noble and important task, to do all that watching of those videos (and yes, of course, you're also watching porn, you lucky people). But you can also - and I know this is AMAZING - use it to easily find answers to your burning questions.
So the next time you find yourself with a burning question you can't immediately think of the answer to, even though the answer is probably easily found and rather obvious, rather than posting that question to a comment thread, try typing that question into a search engine. Not only will you get your question easily and quickly answered, but you'll avoid appearing to be a daft idiot.
SIDE NOTE: For those of you for whom this advice is obvious, and who are annoyed by people who can't seem to use a search engine to answer basic questions, you may want to try Let Me Google That For You. Simply type in a search term, and post the URL as the response. It's so effective, it inspired the Congressional bill equivalent of a slow clap. Snarky? Yes. Effective? Well, even if the only effect is you feeling better about giving a somewhat snide response to something with a painfully obvious answer, you've won.