I was smoking at 12 in France in 1999, I told tobacconists I was buying them for my mom. Pulled the same thing off in the states when I moved there 2 years later. And I was far from alone. These are far more recent (terrible, obviously) habits than you might think.

That’s actually not true, ‘ground apple’ is a common name for different sorts of tubers in a number of different languages, going back to the latin ‘malum terrae’.

We think that of all morons in positions of power, because it’s difficult to fathom how they got there otherwise. Despite all the proof to the contrary, we continue to think meritocracy is a thing. The prosperity gospel is one of the more overt expressions of that belief: if you’re rich, it’s obviously because you’re just the best, smartest little cookie and you deserve it all. What other reasons could there possibly be?

I miss trader Joe’s dried chili mango and candied hibiscus, their entire dried fruit section really.

Right, the problem has nothing to do with the people perpetuating it. Sure.

Arabic, Arabian would refer to the geographic region of the Arabian peninsula. The dialects are on a spectrum, neighboring countries might understand each other reasonably well, but not countries further apart. Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian share a lot of features, same goes for gulf countries, Egyptian is pretty distinct but well known outside the country due to its output of movies, music and tv series, Algerian and Tunisian are pretty similar, Moroccan’s kind of its own thing, Maghrebi dialects also include a lot of vocabulary from Berber languages, which won’t be understood in other regions. Finally, in most countries, local dialects are not taught in school but rather Fusha, or modern standard Arabic, which is the language you’ll hear on the news or read in the papers, and is common to the entire Arabic-speaking world. People don’t speak it day to day but usually understand it well and can communicate in a mix of that and their dialects if they’re speaking to someone from another Arabic-speaking country.