Yes, learning a few letters that form syllables and through that you can read words even though you don’t know what they mean is not practical, it’s better to learn a some thousand symbols and, if you don’t know a symbol at all, you can’t even say it out loud because you can’t read it.
Ideograms are the imperial units of language.

It was (the first world wide language used for diplomacy). If you want to quote Wikipedia, then:

“French is sometimes regarded as the first global lingua franca, having supplanted Latin as the prestige language of politics, trade, education, diplomacy, and military in early modern Europe and later spreading around the world with the establishment of the French colonial empire. With France emerging as the leading political, economic, and cultural power of Europe in the 16th century, the language was adopted by royal courts throughout the continent, including the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Russia, and as the language of communication between European academics, merchants, and diplomats.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca#French

Maybe sailors communicated with locals through a broken pidgin, but diplomats and aristocrats used French.

I first heard of the expression in a fancy dinner a relative brought a diplomat she was dating, and for diplomats all around the world for the last four or five centuries French was the Lingua Franca, as well for meetings between courts, aristocrats, academics, and the first language a book would be translated to because up until a few generations ago if one wanted to learn an “international language” it would learn French, which makes the etymological assumption understandable. However I just went to check some info about it since I was just told Franca doesn’t come from French… turns out, it has nothing to do with Germanic languages as well, but a mix of mostly Romance languages used through the Mediterranean for trade and that maybe got its name because Arabs, Turks, Persians, etc called all Europeans “Franks” and it was synonym of Westerner.

Then it’s just a happy coincidence that it was the first world wide language used for diplomacy.

Just an hour ago I changed my profile mentioning Lingua Franca because I’m downvoting non-English posts not using language tags… the last time I heard that word being used was probably like… 20 years ago maybe? It’s not a common word specially because the word itself doesn’t make much sense anymore (been several decades that French is no longer the trade language, so it just sounds funny)… and after just mentioning it in my profile I see it being used again… by any chance, did you read my profile? lol

nah, new wave was very 80s, I’d divide the 90s between grunge and rave

We are probably just completely out of touch with youth culture

In high school, but not much party politics, I mostly read old anarchists. At college you kinda have to go through the post-structuralist course, but it was then that I got more into reading economy and post/neokeynesianism - which wasn’t even part of the stuff I had to study…
I used to care about arguing about politics and economy, but since my 30s politics became “not my thing” because I watched American politics being spread through Twitter and young people reading more trending American internet liberal activists instead of their local union newspapers, and then I watched all the biggest media conglomerates of my country raising the flag of those activists and they believing they are “winning” without realizing they became so harmless they are being mocked. Nowadays, I just believe we absolutely deserve everything we get.

I’m particularly tired of the echo chambers social media created that turned everything in an “us vs them” mentality that when you don’t agree 100% on every topic you are a them and an enemy and everyone is under that homogenizing peer-pressure to conform… and I include the Fediverse on that, it’s the same crap. I don’t feel like being a part of any “us”, especially because I see everything corrupted by the American WASP-culture addiction to guilty and shaming that equally encompass conservatives and liberals, as the “us vs them” slowly kills all the real transgressive. I want distance from all the “us”.

I use my cellphone only to message relatives and play some MP3s. It’s a Samsung J2 Core I bought in 2019 because it was the cheapest non-second-hand smartphone I could find at the time. Its last security patch was in 2021, and they dropped support. It’s barely compatible with the current Google ecosystem, and I’m probably getting locked out of it anytime now because apps will refuse to work… even LineageOS, which supposedly increases the life of smartphones, doesn’t support it… I’m sad I’m going to have to spend money on one of these sometime soon even though it’s still working.

A Roman dodecahedron, it fucks with modern people as well.