None of Star Wars makes any sense in context. From "Darth" to the whole I think I have your dad's lightsaber stashed here somewhere thing to who Luke's family is supposed to be and these days even Obi Wan's weird desert hermit outfit now being official Jedi uniform, apparently or how Vader keeps getting bullied by all of the Empire's middle management.
Honestly, that last one is the most impressive. In retrospect, Tarkin is an absolute badass that doesn't give a crap about Vader's whole deal. And it works. The magic space wizard that basically runs the empire and everybody is terrified of just sits there and takes it. You have to respect that.
This. There is zero chance of creating change by voting for a third party selectively in a FPTP system.
Electoral systems are known to be extremely stable because all the power is in the hands of people who benefit from the current system, again by definition. Crucially, it doesn't matter WHO they are, if they won with this system, they are for this system.
To get electoral reform you need those who benefit to find it either ethically important or politically expedient to enact reform. Right now is actually a good time to start bringing up that issue, because one has to assume there is a growing realization in Democrats and at least a segment of semi-reasonable conservatives that the current system is exposed to very, very bad things in a short timeframe.
So if the US is going to get electoral reform done without going through the process of setting the country, and subsequently the planet, on fire you need a) a Dem in power, and b) a massive consensus and outright downpour of activist pressure for this on every level of government. Probably forever, seeing how the entire rest of the system is a mess, but baby steps.
But that's my point, it hasn't been, and it wasn't.
Again, Latin was mandatory in my high school for a year, optional for two more. In the 1990s. It's still optional, I believe. My parents went to church in Latin as kids.
So no, it doesn't sound mystical outside the anglosphere, it sounds like crusy old priests, lawyers and boring lessons. Today.
Yes? I think you may have missed my point in the shuffle.
What I'm saying here is that Latin doesn't make sense as a mystical, secret language for magic because it was too common. I'm not saying it wasn't the language of scholars, I'm saying that not only was it the language of scholars, so every treatise on optics or history would have triggered accidental lightning bolts, but it was also a commonly spoken language as well.
Hey, you know what is lingua franca for science while being widely spoken? English.
No, wait, it was not "lingua franca in the educated western world", vulgar latin was just... the language a lot of Europe spoke for centuries.
People think of Latin as this highbrow educated thing, because that's what was left of it after the development of romance languages from vulgar Latin, but Latin was just what normal people used to talk to each other for a long time.
And yes, sure, texts on alchemy, mysticism and religion were written on it.
Also texts on food recipes, tax collection, how the tree from your neighbour's yard was blocking the sun to your oranges and the rude graffitti in the tables of the pub.
Honestly, I don't see why the chosen language would have to matter to your fictitious magic system. Surely if you have to say words and words mean things, the language doesn't affect what the words mean. I tend to like it when people still manage to tap into magical thinking without the crutch of pulling what they think sounds old-timey from somewhere. Neil Gaiman, Jim Henson or Grant Morrison were/are really good at it.
Or, you know, if you're a meganerd like Tolkien you can always just... make a whole new language for it. That also works.
Why are anglo writers obsessed with using latin as some ancient, mystical language? Why would Latin be tied to magic in any way? Do they realize that Latin was spoken all through Europe for millenia and its vulgar form evolved into tons of current languages? Or that people were using latin in churches, courtrooms and universtities all the way up to the 20th century? Latin was an optional in my high school. I took two years.
If random Latin words could do magic all of Europe would have been constantly exploding. Newspapers would be covering the latest magic volcano to pop up in Southern France. World War II movies would include accidental summonings.
Also, for us romance language speakers it sounds vaguely understandable, so the weird things they use for spells sound goofy as hell. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than using fake Latin-sounding made up stuff as in Harry Potter.
I use ones that are explicitly labelled with a black strip. My tactic for opening them is to put them between my lips and blow, which works pretty well but got really weird during the mandatory masking periods.
Absolutely, if you've ever made the types of sausages for cold cuts at home it's very obvious. People think the white powdery thing is just cool packaging (and to be fair in ultraprocessed crap it can be), but nope, that stuff is transparent when you get started.
Also, the "transparent stuff"? Disemboweled guts. I mean, the mold should be the least of your concerns if you're going by gross-out factor.
Nope. Honestly, I stopped tinkering with that stuff altogether ages ago. It's a candybar that gives me text messages and takes photos, I don't need to make it my own.
It definitely sounds that our system was a bit more standardized than that, which checks out and is both a strenght and a weakness depending on how you look at it.