This is why learning Latin the way I did (very methodically and technically, with no real speaking/responding) makes you good at parsing it, but not at speaking it. There are schools today where it's taught as if it were a spoken language.

You don't have to eat fish, you just have to avoid poultry and red meat. The intent was sacrifice as penance for sins. And in the US and some other countries, it's really only mentioned during Lent (Ash Wednesday to the day before Easter); the rest of the year, it's encouraged to do that or some other form of penance, but everyone ignores it.

My 5-year-old loves the British series Numberblocks, and they have lots of licensed toys.

My 9-year-old still remembers that show and sometimes says things like “did you know that fifteen is a staircase number?”

I think the show gave him an intuitive understanding of numbers and made basic math easy for him

It really is a genius-level show. I’m so happy it exists. Every detail is just perfect and both my kids love it and have learned so much from it.

It doesn’t hurt that it’s so entertaining they love watching it over and over, making it even more impossible to avoid committing its (very useful) memes to memory!

My kids were watching it at 5-6. But I believe they didn't understand that a staircase number is a sum or a rectangular is a product (they had to relearn that later in school).

"Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them", John von Neumann

The numberblocks theme song goes so hard.

OK, I just tried Numberblocks on my 6yo and it was a HIT

Wow, "Dear Penthouse,"

The verbal construction words you learn in Classics are excellent. Litotes, chiasmus, synecdoche...

How do conference-room names fare in this view? My current company names them after football teams or local landmarks. But I heard about someone who used to work somewhere that named theirs after WWII battles, which was awkward for the Japanese guy they interviewed in one of them.

The approximate substitute-good for porn is actual sex, which parents generally stop teens from doing. The substitute-good for social media is talking to people in person, which parents are generally happy with.

The winner takes it all!

You do sometimes hear of Olympians in the non-big-pro-league sports whose families make enormous financial and lifestyle sacrifices to let them train and compete.

That was true for all Olympians before they allowed professionals to compete.

The experience of going to a movie may not be what it was before streaming or even the VCR, but the fewer theaters that remain have gotten nicer in their own way. I can recline the big leather chair and have food delivered to my seat.

One of the WSJ comments made the comparison to drive-ins, which are now a rare niche thing...I think my US metro area has maybe 2 left. But those have less control over the viewer experience than a regular theater does.