Holy shit, I did my equivalent of this class over 2 decades ago and I remember this bloody joke.
Whoever wrote that book has got a lot of mileage from it
Edit: oh the screencap is older than a decade lol
I just checked and every single textbook I own that contains a reference to this transformation uses an image of a sheep. Sadly all of my textbooks are in English. If I had any relevant texts in German or Spanish I doubt that they would makes this connection.
On an less relevant note one of the books introduces the idea of change of basis with a joke about labeling axes and has several different types of ax with corresponding labels attached and I find that to be a much worse joke.
In English the tool for chopping down trees is spelled axe. Just letting you know since you’re multilingual and I assume English isn’t your first language.
English is my first language. Ax and axe are used interchangeably. They’re both correct.