welcome

She/her | Dutch | 28

[fizzfags]

how it feels to wash your hair and brush your teeth and have clean clothes on

[doomdaysdecays-deactivated20251]

ooooo you wanna take a shower so bad

[vampireopossum]

[avoidbeing]

An obsidian mirror found at Catalhoyuk, 8,000 years old

[old-flesh]

“get the fries, you’ll need the energy in the coming days”

[grimeclown]

Cmon man

[softichill]

I loooove ominously giggling when I'm getting my friends into smth new. They ask me a spoilery question and I get to do this

[biomaterial]

new kind of guy dropped

[3liza]

he's unironically 100% correct and i will hear nothing against him

[misscrazyfangirl321]

Being an adult will have you unironically craving a vegetable

[misscrazyfangirl321]

Being an adult will have you unironically sad about a parasite outbreak in fresh vegetables.

[the-grollican]

ishmael using a pseudonym is so funny. like what are you in witness protection? from the whale?

[blackpyrefly]

I heard another video game is coming out soon

this has to stop

[iamthelowercase]

Hello, tumblr! I saw something on here the other day that worried me, so I decided to Do Science about it. But I can't do it alone: I need your help to build the dataset!

Here's what I need you to do:

If you see a post with a "mature content" label, and it's 2026, DM me a link to the post.

Yes, that's really it.

I am hoping to collect several thousand such posts, so that I have a decent sized dataset. I do not care what the post is about; if it's labeled as "mature content", I want to add it to my dataset.

If I get 10,000 posts in my dataset before August 31st 2026, I will post my preliminary findings then. I won't feel comfortable calling my findings "settled" before 2027, unless I get over 50,000 posts.

[femmechilles]

if both teams in the final failed to beat you in 90min you should be crowned the honorary world cup champion. congratulations cabo verde 🥳

[eldritchqueerture]

the existence of "maybe", "perhaps", "perchance", and "mayhaps" suggests there should also be "maychance" and "perbe"

[eldritchqueerture]

CAN WE MAYCHANCE NOT 😭

[clottedcreamfudge]

Perbe you should have thought about the consequences before posting a linguistic banger

[noahwyles]

i, a rock collector, had to go to the ER yesterday because of a gallstone attack, here is how my father messaged me

thanks dad

[anremithrl]

That was the correct thing to say.

[millionsknives]

can you curry anything else or is it just favor

[millionsknives]

tim

[sufficientlylargen]

So "currying" a furry animal means grooming or brushing it with a currycomb, which in turn comes from the Old French correier meaning "to prepare [something]", because you prepare a horse for riding by brushing it; it's most commonly applied to horses but you can get e.g. currycombs for dogs.

If I understand correctly, medieval French folk tales considered chestnut-colored horses to be deceitful and tricky; the Old French word for a chestnut or dun horse was fauvel, and so the Old French expression correier fauvel, literally "to brush the chestnut horse", meant lying or being hypocritical for personal gain. This turned into "curry favel" in 15th-century English, and then mutated into "curry favor" over the next few centuries as people forgot about the horse.

So "currying favor" is really "brushing the Horse of Lies", and the reason you can't curry goodwill, or love, or hatred, or even disfavor is that we didn't have Horses for those.

And it follows that we can gain the ability to curry other things by assigning them to Horses.

[sufficientlylargen]

#google is backing you up on this (via @oldguardians)

I realize, looking back on this post, that regular readers of my blog may have thought I made this up. Making up a ridiculous etymology is certainly the sort of thing I might do; in fact I've been meaning to start a sideblog dedicated solely to sufficiently accurate etymologies, and have a notebook with dozens of them jotted down, I just haven't had the time to do anything with them.

But I want to stress that this is not one of those cases. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the very real etymology of the phrase "curry favor".

The Old French fauve or falve referred to the light-brown color that's sometimes called "fallow" in modern English, but since it also sounded similar to faux, meaning "false", it was also associated with deceit and trickery ; the idiom estriller Fauvel literally meant "to groom the fallow one" but idiomatically meant "to lie or trick people".

Then in the 1300s we get the French poem Roman de Fauvel, a satirical poem about a fauve horse, whose name is derived both from the color and from the fact that FAVVEL is an acronym of Flaterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Varieté, Envie, Lascheté (Flattery, Greed, Vileness, Fickleness, Envy, and Cowardice) - all the different vices that this horse embodies.

Fauvel (purportedly modeled after Enguerrand de Marigny [source], an advisor to King Philip IV) is a sinful, conniving, and very rich horse who has various religious and secular leaders fawning over him and brushing him; it was well-known enough that "grooming Fauvel" came to mean "sucking up to someone powerful" more than just "being evil", and when it was translated into English the grooming was translated as currying, which specifically is grooming a horse with a curry comb [wiktionary]. From this we got the Middle English expression "currying Fauvel", which then mutated via folk etymology (in the "reinterpretation of unfamiliar words as more familiar ones" sense, not the "people are wrong about etymology" sense) into "currying favor".

Curry favor in:

Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curry_favor

Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/curry%20favor

Etymonline: https://www.etymonline.com/word/curry

[twentybrokenipodclassics]

the postal service names their shit exactly like how a 16 y.o. names angsty fanfic

[punk-squirrely-ghost]

Explain.

[twentybrokenipodclassics]

try and tell me literally any one of these would not fit above a short story about two wholly random men from the MCU fingering each other, or possibly 12 chapters of one or more characters from a CW show being in high school while having a photogenic but terminal kind of cancer. try.

[twentybrokenipodclassics]

ok so i want to say in hindsight i think i could probably have been clearer

[rimonoroni2]

[ryebreadgf]

[meltingpotofinterests]

[sepdet]

gaaaah. I remember when some high school varsity teams insisted on being called “women’s volleyball” and “women’s lacrosse” to parallel “men’s basketball.”

And oh, the corrections were swift and firm if anyone dared use “girl” for college students. The women’s rugby team invites you to stop by.

[jonathanssweatercollection]

loving the lord of the rings so far

[handmed0wnart]

[yffresbeard]

i think it is important to recognize the ways in which your favorite thing sucks. i think it keeps u normal

[rabbithaver]

prev im so sorry to put you on blast like this but please know this had me in hysterics

[empress-of-dark2005]