Slightly related cool one that my japanese family explained me is that 'w' was used for 'warau' (aka "lol") in online japanese speech. And so for "laughing a l

Slightly related cool one that my japanese family explained me is that 'w' was used for 'warau' (aka "lol") in online japanese speech. And so for "laughing a lot" people would write 'wwwwwwww'. But then 'wwwwwwwwww' looks not unlike grass. So now to say they're laughing a lot, they're using the real kanji for grass. We went from 'w', a romanji used as a shortcut for a japanese word, to a kanji because, visually, many 'wwwwwwww' looked somehow like grass. It's fascinating how in Japan the approach feels more visual. I mean: we may be doing similar things with our "romanji" (roman characters, as japanese calls them) but it's less common. Speech / ideas / words: it's really something else.