25p coins are 4 anna :)

1 anna doesn't work in the modern decimalized system

wait how old are you that you actually had 1 anna coins in use

it was very funny to hear myself explain a coin as the equivalent of a long dead denomination of a completely different currency

and even funnier when it worked just fine

so in British India, an anna used to be 1/16th of a rupee. After independence they decimalized the currency so that a rupee was 100 paise

but in marathi people *still* refer to the 25 paise coin as "4 annas"

so it's our closest word for "quarter (coin)"

tldr was that they tend to get used as political career kickstarters

most countries have appointed or half-appointed-half-elected school boards with skill requirements

i once heard a really good talk from a former councilmember/mayor about how elected school boards are horrible and lead to the worst outcomes

apparently it's the largest elected position in the country??

yeah like for local politicians I've noticed both: our former mayor definitely had a lot of growth over the years

and otoh my former councilmember was a total windsock and kinda bad

both were "politicians first" vibes wise. the mayor was good at it.

primary elections are another way in which a party attempts to update its positions based on what is representative of the people

i kinda feel like it should be both: your party should have strongly-held beliefs, and be known for them, and then be open to trying to follow popular positions for the rest, which increases the chances that their positions are actually representative

no the plural of pierogum would be pieroga not pierogi

but you are welcome to accept it nevertheless

no

I'd say this has more to do with the multidimensionality of signed languages rather than "spoken languages get to be written down"

i would caution about making this about writing: writing hasn't been a thing for most spoken languages in history, *and by and large* writing doesn't drive the language structure though we might see that changing over time

yeah 100% I've noticed this

it helps that ASL has both negation words and morphological negation, it makes sense that you can mix them

ME NOT HUNGRY
ME no-HUNGRY
ME NOT no-HUNGRY

like of course me shaking my head when signing HUNGRY doesn't reverse the fact that I signed NOT earlier

In an old ad for board game Scattergories in Spain a player was shown flouncing out while anothet said “OK, we’ll accept ‘octopus’ as a pet”.
“Aceptamos pulpo” has now entered the language in the meaning of “that’s a bit of a stretch but let’s go with it just for the sake of argument”.