Leaves grow upward because they would die in the depths, just as roots would die in the air.

English is a Germanic language that has had significant Latin and French (which added more Latin) injected into it over the years. It has to be the most mongrel widespread language in existence, which is probably why it’s such a mess when it comes to spelling. Still, it also has a lot of flexibility and word choices because of it.

It has made finding actually useful information harder nowadays, but I’ll still accept the blame for this one.

Thanks, my google-fu wasn’t up to the task. That’s about what I was expecting.

The dog shit on their boots is a nice touch.

I’d have to get a list of every country considered “western” and then figure out how many have predominantly Latin-derived and Germanic-derived languages. Too much work. “Nearly every” one of them would most certainly not be Latin-derived, though.

Looks kinda like that Chickpea comic.

There’s Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese…there are more Germanic-derived ones than Latin-derived, aren’t there?

Reminds me of a time in elementary school when our class had a lesson on the importance of reading all instructions before starting a project, then we had a test with long, elaborate instructions. Of course, the very last sentence was something along the lines of disregarding all previous instructions and setting your pencil down. I think maybe one other kid besides me got it and was sitting there while the rest of the class was furiously working away, some of them wondering how we were already finished.

Marketing gimmick. It’s only for a week and only available online.

Chilean Mutant Sea Bass Crackers

Do people really usually have a more vivid picture in their heads?

I can’t speak for others, but I do if they’re concepts I’ve encountered before. I have “default” visualizations of things that are changed if the description warrants it.

I imagined the same red, baseball-ish sized rubber ball. Not sure why that’s my default for “ball.”

It was, but they’re just making a point unrelated to the specific Mario game depicted.

It’s interesting how much technology has slowed down. Back in the 80s and 90s a 5 year old game looked horribly outdated. Now we’re getting close to some 20 year old games still looking pretty decent.

A lot of words in English have a Germanic and Latin version. The Germanic one tends to be more common in everyday use, while the Latin one tends to be more formal, a consequence of French being the language of the aristocracy back in the day. Spanish is all Latin-derived, so they would of course be the everyday words.