No title available
EXPECTATIONS
gracie abrams
No title available
roma★
RMH
KIROKAZE
Noah Kahan
Cookie Run:Kingdom Official!
Cosmic Funnies
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
Monterey Bay Aquarium
No title available
Origami Around
izzy's playlists!
tannertan36
Fieri Frames
Jimmy Eat World
No title available
No title available
seen from Malaysia
seen from Indonesia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Canada
seen from Paraguay
seen from Russia
seen from Iraq
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Brazil
seen from Philippines
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from France
seen from Morocco
seen from Australia
@kittyparade666
In these more stoic cultures, it’s like, if I don’t know you, you’re not in. But the moment you are in, I will fucking die for you. Once Shane was in, Ilya was like, “You’re mine forever. I will do anything for you.” — Connor Storrie
the cutiest patooties
The Long Game — Chapter Nineteen | insp.
Reckoning. Ink on paper, 2025. Micah Ulrich.
Have you seen this post?
You probably have. It currently has over 120,000 notes, largely because of this addition.
Of course it's going to get reblogged, this kind of unsourced factoid does numbers on here. But something about it wasn't quite right.
A bit of searching turned up the origin of the "fact".
Alright, so it's someone who posted this on reddit 4 years ago and somehow ended up in the search hits. And the post confuses the electric eel (from South America) with the electric catfish (from the Nile, which the Egyptians would have known about).
Reminder: this is an electric eel (Electrophorus electricus). It is from South America. (image from Wikipedia)
And this is an electric catfish (Malapterurus electricus). It is from the Nile and would have been familiar to the ancient Egyptians. (image from Wikipedia)
And then of course people were speculating in the notes to that post about trade routes between South America and Egypt. Excellent scholarship everyone.
At this point I was ready to call it another made-up internet fact that gets reified by people repeating it. But something was still bothering me.
An ancient Egyptian slab from 3100 BC. What could that be...
Oh.
The Narmer palette. It's the goddamn Narmer palette. (image, once again, from Wikipedia)
So where is this "angry catfish"?
It's not the Egyptian name for the electric catfish.
It's... Narmer. It's Narmer himself.
Narmer's name is written as above (detail of top middle of the palette), using the catfish (n`r) and the chisel (mr), giving N'r-mr. The chisel is associated with pain, so this reads as "painful catfish", "striking catfish", or, yes, "angry catfish" or other similar variants, although some authors have suggested that it means "Beloved of [the catfish god] Nar".
So.
Where does this leave us?
It would appear that this redditor not only confused electric eels with electric catfish, but also confused a Pharaoh's name with the name of a fish. And then it got pushed to the top search hits by a crappy search engine and shared uncritically on tumblr.
In short, "the electric eel is called angry catfish" factoid actually literacy error. Angry Catfish, who ruled upper Egypt and smote his enemies, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.
Also the Arabic name for the electric catfish is raad (thunder) or raada (thunderer).
References
Afsaruddin, A., & Zahniser, A. H. M. (1997). Humanism, culture, and language in the Near East: studies in honor of Georg Krotkoff. Eisenbrauns.
Clayton, P. A. (2001). Chronicle of the Pharaohs. Thames & Hudson.
Godron, G. (1949). A propos du nom royal. Annales du Service des antiquités de l'Egypte, 49, 217-221.
Sperveslage, G., & Heagy, T. C. (2023). A tail's tale: Narmer, the catfish, and bovine symbolism. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 109(1), 3-319.
my 3 week old lettuce in the fridge because i forgot about it
Twitter really is going to be totally unusable huh
#this had to be done
I read this as the beta male and alpha male talking to each other 💀
Sometimes you see a picture of Oscar Isaac looking like the world’s most perfect husband and you’re like “wow hot” and then you see the FULL picture complete with Elvira’s behind the scenes info
and you realize your opinion has not changed
Here’s Canada’s reigning royal couple, Avril Lavigne and Chad Kroeger, spreading their beautiful love in Paris while looking like Cool Dad picking up his angsty 8th grade daughter from junior high school to take her to buy the Wheatus CD at f.y.e. because the year is 2001.
