I hate that. Once, in Chamonix, my mum’s suitcase got lost on the way over (nightmare) and we had to go to a chemist to replace some of her medication. I prepared a big speech in French, he heard me out, then he answered me in English. I guess he was just trying to be helpful but I wanted to practise my French, dammit!
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Well obviously. 
But it’s just weird to hear a fancy Latin word as the regular term for such a regular object. 
It’s nothing like the properly Dutch word pompbak.
That’s very much general Dutch. Een voorwerp is niet aanwezig. Enkel personen zijn afwezig.
@sushi, by living in Belgium, which languages did you learn at school?
German is somewhat neglected here in Flanders. At the basis you have the two main languages of the country, Dutch and French, followed by the European lingua franca (English). The forgotten third language of the country, German, is the fourth language in education.
Schools can optionally offer other languages from EU or BRIC countries iirc.
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Must…resist…the…obvious…diddly doodly!
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Dutch, French, English, German.
On top, you can also study some dead languages like Latin or ancient Greek. But I wouldn’t say you are fluent enough in those.
You… me? 
New question:
A link on a web page … leads / points / goes / links / jumps / something else … to another page?
I’d say ‘goes’. But if I was at work I’d probably say ‘directs’.
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Pretty much anything but “jumps,” but it I´d say it depends on the context.
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I would say a link “goes”, and maybe “leads”. Or an image “links” to another page.
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A link can jump to a different location on the same page.
Those don’t necessarily have the same connotation. A link by itself points/specifies/refers to/leads to/links to/etc. a location (where it goes). But if you click a link it doesn’t just point to the Thimbleweed Park website anymore. It goes there. More colloquially a link also “goes” to the Thimbleweed Park website without clicking on it, just like all roads go to Rome.[1] Stylistically it’s generally recommended to use more varied and precise vocabulary than just “get” and “go.”
[1] The proper expression is of course lead to Rome.
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One…
(On in French)
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A link…
Zapps you to…
Takes you to…
At least, you follow the link, no question about that!
So if you follow, perhaps the link guides you to…
But imo, a link just links to. Refers to, at best. And you click it. Or not. Which makes the link pointless. No point, no click.
Point ‘n’ Click
Thimbleweed Park!
(Phew, that was a bit of three degrees of separation)
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Here?
Weren’t you Dutch? As in born and raised in the Netherlands?
Which perfectly reflects the demographics in Belgium. To be honest, the German speaking community in Belgium is a historical abberation.
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I’m one of those nasty immigrants. Vlaams Belang gives me a free paper about how horrible we are every two months or so.
Build more mosques! Build more mosques! #missionaccomplished
It was tongue-in-cheek of course, but Germany is our neighbor as well.
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if @frenzie can speak for Flanders/Belgium as a Dutchman, allow me to take you on a short(?) history about the Netherlands and carrots. Oh and don’t worry, there’s lots of language related stuff in it too.
Ever wondered why (most) carrots are orange? By nature, carrots always had different colors, ranging from white to almost black. So these more expensive yellow or purple carrots you can buy these days, have been around for a much longer time and aren’t something newly fashioned.
Actually the color of carrots is orange because the color of oranges is. Not because they are genetically related or something.
The story goes like this:
Over 2000 years ago, shortly after Julius Caear, the Romans built a city in the south of France at the place of a conquered Celtic settlement named after one of the Celtic gods: Arausio. This name evolved over time into Ouranjo in Provençal or Orange in French [ɔʁɑ̃ʒ]. You can still visit a lot of Roman buildings, theatres,… today in Orange, by the way.
Hey! That’s like orange, the fruit, which also has the color orange, you say?
Right so. The fruit was actually already called naranga in Sanskrit at the time of the Romans. Over a period of 1000 years the fruit and its name traveled to Persia/ Arab (narang), via Spain/Castillo (naranja) and eventually France (arange).
So by the Middle Ages, the fruit is called arange, city called Orange. Now those fruits were imported into Western Europe from China. That’s why they’re called, still to this day “appelsien” (in Belgium) or “sinaasappel” (in the Netherlands): pommes de Chine or “apples from China/China’s apple”. They came in over the Mediterranean Sea by ship up the river Rhône until the city of Orange. From there on they were distributed and were thus also called “pommes d’Orange”, apples from the city Orange. * Or in short orange. The fact that the name arange and Orange is only a minor difference in the sound of the first syllable must have definitively helped in mixing up both words. History has its fair share of coincidences.
At that time, oranges (fruit) introduced a pretty new unique color which was both like red and yellow but not quite. So they named that color simply after the fruit itself: orange. Before people maybe called it dark yellow, who knows…
A couple of centuries later, mid 16th century, Guillaume de Nassau (Willem van Nassau), the count of Nassau (in modern day Germany) inherits the title Prince of Orange and together with some properties and land in the Netherlands, his family house is renamed to house of Orange-Nassau. Standard Game of Thrones stuff. Cue some religious war (more Game of Thrones stuff) where Willem fights for the Protestant side and sporting the color orange in his team’s jerseys. His house will rule over England, South Africa and almost all of the other seven kingdoms in time, but that’s another story.
As we all know from Game of Thrones, it never hurts to suck up to the current ruler of the day. So the story goes that some carrot farmers cross-bred** orange-colored carrots in honor of the Prince/king of Orange-Nassau.
And that is why to this day, carrots are orange.
Because Willem’s battle color was orange.
Because his house’s name was Orange.
Because oranges are orange.
* : Similar to how denim (jeans fabric) has its roots in “de Nîmes” (another nice Roman city in the Provence).
**: Recent DNA research shows that orange colored carrots existed before, so it’s not that orange carrots are artificial, but there definitively was a heavy human selection and genetic narrowing involved (similar to breeding of dog races).
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so is the UK
Although with that Brexit 
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Congratulations! You know more about orange than anyone else in the entire universe, probably! 
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Still going to stubbornly call myself a European after we leave.
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