Reminds me of the Ann Arbor Hands-on Museum I went to a few times as a kid. Some of my fondest memories of any museum or other similar activity are there. There were countless things to do and when I was young there were no screens to be had. I would be curious to go check it out and see if they are still following the same sort of idea or if they have fallen victim to the popularization of the screen.
As it usually goes browsing this site, this was not the news I was expecting today. Having watched that scene a good handful of times, it always felt the trench was not up to scale. Good to know that it's because I was thinking they were in the equatorial trench upon every watch-through.
US tends to drop the u's in a lot of words. It doesn't make the original word french.
That said, a lot of english words do come from french. In fact, the english word favour came from the old french favor, apparently?
c. 1300, "attractiveness, beauty, charm" (archaic), from Old French favor "a favor; approval, praise; applause; partiality" (13c., Modern French faveur), from Latin favorem (nominative favor) "good will, inclination, partiality, support," coined by Cicero from stem of favere "to show kindness to," from PIE *ghow-e- "to honor, revere, worship" (cognate: Old Norse ga "to heed").
I literally can't tell how much you're joking. There's nothing French about the spelling of these contemporary English words, even though they have norman roots.
One of the neat linguistic things still in English from the Norman conquest - the word for the meat in English (which is traced back to German) is often the word for the animal in French.
Meat from cattle is beef. Steer in French is beof ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/beef : From Middle English beef, bef, beof, borrowed from Anglo-Norman beof, Old French buef, boef (“ox”) )
Meat from a chicken is poultry. Chicken is poulet in French. ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poultry : From Middle English pultrie, from Old French pouleterie, from poulet, diminutive of poule (“hen”), from Latin pullus (“chick”). )
Meat from a swine is pork. The word for swine in French is porc. ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pork From Middle English pork, porc, via Anglo-Norman, from Old French porc (“swine, hog, pig; pork”), from Latin porcus (“domestic hog, pig”).)
This is because when the normans (who were the rulers at the time) wanted poulet on the table, they didn't want a live chicken - they wanted a cooked chicken and so the word the meat and the animal diverged in English.
Very basic words in english (eg water, man, milk, drink) tend to have Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) roots whereas newer more abstract words tend to have come in after the 1066 Norman Conquest, with French words eclipsing their Anglo-Saxon equivalents, as the Norman aristocracy supplanted the Anglo-Saxon rulers.
