This happens all over the world, all the time, because humans are not machines. Words undergo various changes when borrowed, sometimes on purpose. For instance, the Turkish word for “treasure room” – hazine – has become a pejorative term for “toilet” in my language (hazna).
Well, my father would often refer to the toilet as his throne.
A while back we went over the whole Turkish Pavilion/toilet euphemism
You guys talked about prostates? In the 1950s all we knew was wee-wees. I do remember when my dad left one of those sex education pamphlets lying around and me and my brother latched on the the climaxing statement (heh, heh) and would walk around repeating it, “Then the father puts his penis in the mother’s vagina” Except we pronounced “vagina” as “VAG in na” (sort of like Saginaw until the girl next door corrected us.
Nothing has made me feel dumber than trying to answer the thousand questions a day my son asks, including stuff like this. I did learn it all at one point, I just didn’t retain it. The most recent one was “What is the winter solstice?” Which I answered incorrectly and then had to go back and revise my answer to him.
If the earth’s tilt causes the seasons, what is the effect of the Earth being various distances from the sun throughout the year? I would think it would be colder when it’s further from the sun, no?
The one question I’ve never been able to answer conceptually is what is synchronous rotation? I learned about it in college and no amount of the professor’s explanations make any sense to me. It’s been twenty years since I took astronomy and it still bothers me that I don’t understand this.
Yes, the distance does have an effect. But it’s a much smaller effect than the effect of the tilt.
It basically means that the Moon always shows the same face towards the Earth (it can apply to lots of astronomical systems, but the Moon and the Earth is the one that gets discussed the most). Imagine your son standing in the middle of the room, while you walk around him. But you do so in such a way that you’re always facing him. You are rotating: Sometimes you’re facing north, sometimes you’re facing east, sometimes south, and sometimes west. But you’re rotating at the same rate that you’re going around him, so you’re always facing him. If, by contrast, you walked around him in such a way that you’re always facing north, then you wouldn’t be rotating, but sometimes your back would be to him. Or, of course, you could rotate and also sometimes turn your back, if you were rotating at some other rate.
An example of synchronous rotation is the Moon’s rotation. The Moon rotates once a month, in such a way that the same side of the Moon is always facing the Earth. This is also called tidal locking, since it is caused by the Earth’s tidal effect on the Moon. Originally, the Moon was rotating faster, but the Earth created friction to slow it down. The Earth’s gravity causes the Moon to bulge on the side directly facing the Earth and on the side directly opposite. In the past, this bulge moved around the Moon, just as the Moon causes the Earth and its ocean to bulge in a twice daily cycle (the tides). This process dissipated energy and caused the rotation of the Moon to slow down until it was synchronous with the revolution around the Earth.
Because of libration, we can see 59% of the moon’s surface, not 50%:
Okay! I guess I didn’t consider always facing the earth to be rotating. But I see now that if something is orbiting a fixed point, to stay facing that object it would have to turn on its axis.
Yes?
Yes, exactly.
Can’t find it anymore but I saw an interesting animation of the sun rotating around the Milky Way, while the earth makes a corkscrew trail around it, while the moon makes a corkscrew around that trail.
That’s right. In the Northern Hemisphere, the Earth is actually further from the Sun in summer than in winter, so the distance actually works against the tilt there. In the Southern Hemisphere, January (which is in summer) is warmer because of the closer distance. But not much.
That is much simpler than I was trying to make it in my head. Thank you and @JWT_Kottekoe for solving this decades-long mystery!
I was recently reminded of this (I think I probably knew before somewhere in the recesses of my trivia brain 
) as that was the last time a world cup will not feature matches in the host nation’s capital city, in 1974 when West Germany hosted. DC will host no matches this year at the world cost.
Ah, good, maybe that stupid animation has finally died. I’m still not sure why anyone went to the trouble to make that animation, without going to the much easier trouble of making it accurate.
Okay, well, congratulations. My ignorance wasn’t exactly corrected by that, but you did lodge a good insult.
My apologies. The animation showed the Earth trailing behind the Sun in its corkscrew, and the Moon likewise trailing behind the Earth. Neither of those happens. It also got the directions of motion wrong. Back when it was all over the place on the Web, it got very tiresome explaining that it was wrong.
Correction taken and apology accepted, both with thanks.
So one thing I should know, given the amount of military history I read and watch (which is a lot), is the sizes of different military units. I really don’t. I don’t even know the hierarchy of unit sides, is a company bigger than a battalion, or vice versa? A division is the biggest, I think?