\nOur Japanese class found it funny that in common terminology “food” isn’t very distinguished from specifically “rice” until it was pointed out to us that in English “meal” is “loose roughly ground grain”
Congratulations to my first post to break 100,000!
As people point out and I freely admit, the two senses of “meal” aren’t derived from each other or otherwise etymologically related, but I do think that when linguistic drift brought the words for “a regular session of food consumption” and “the staple food” together it stabilized them; to change either independently would lose that neat resonance.
Also a striking example of how a message generalizes out a few complexity levels as the audience grows: people started out tagging about equivalent pairings and other homophones in their languages, but the back half of the notes came from a reply thread that was more juvenile wordplay and nostalgia reference humor, and lately people are tagging about combinations of sounds that feel funny to them
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