Spawn

As I can't seem to keep from mentioning, I got an iPod Touch, and when I said there were more than a thousand applications for it, I was severely underestimating the popularity of the platform, because there are over a thousand games for it, and something like six thousand applications in all. Makes me very glad I got the 32-gigabyte version: storage space for the foreseeable future!

I downloaded a demo of a stripped-down version of Spore, and look what I found on the game's website (and also inside the game itself):

Maybe it isn't common knowledge that there are two words in English, "teem" and "team", and that they don't have the same meaning. I don't know. But it doesn't seem to me that "teem" is a particularly rare or difficult word, and you'd think, wouldn't you, that a professional operation like EA could get it right?

The words are actually related, as you might guess from their meanings (to teem is to abound with; a team is a group of people or animals). But they parted company a very long time ago, and they haven't been playing the same game ever since.

"Teem" originally meant "to produce offspring", and it's the (slightly) younger member of the family. "Team" meant, among other things, "offspring" and "child-bearing", and it originates from Indo-European "deuk-", which is tremendously interesting but which I am going to have to leave until tomorrow, because I have some errands to run before I go off to work.