Overcoat Overkill

f, 30s, a place to store things I like. It seems to have become a poetry blog.

[thethirdromana]

The 100 best novels of all time

The top 100 novels of all time published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide. How many have you read?

How many of the Guardian's 100 best novels of all time have you read?

0-10

11-20

21-30

31-40

41-50

51-60

61-70

71-80

81-90

91-100

Voting ended onMay 19

Bonus: add in the tags which one is your favourite.

[orpheuslament]

lets do some medical roleplay. youre my doctor & you have to perform some minor surgery on me but this is the 18th century & theres no anaesthetic so i go into shock & die. yes of course its still sexual

[sufficientlylargen]

Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The eeb that deebs, the blorb that plinks!

’Twas Tumblr, and the slithy memes Did bode and call out on the dash: Fucken WIMDY were the shitpost streams, And of things was the trash.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The eeb that deebs, the blorb that plinks! Beware of Shittos Glup, and shun Bendlebick Cumperdincks!”

He took his discourse sword in hand; Long time the chungus foe he sought— So rested he in the ball pit (free!) And sat awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish (derogatory) thought he sat, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came GIFfling through the old group chat, And hurgled as it came!

UWU! UWU! And through and through The discourse blade went "Um, actually, the Jabberwock is coded as friendly because 'eyes of flame' means red and orange, and those are warm and inviting colors according to 'color theory', which I guess you haven't heard of and don't understand." He left it dead, and with its head He man car door hook hand.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boi! O #frabjousday! Sounds fake but okay!” He reblogged in his joy.

’Twas Tumblr, and the slithy memes Did bode and call out on the dash: Fucken WIMDY were the shitpost streams, And all of us were trash.

[marlynnofmany]

I saw this months ago, and I still want "O frabjousday! Sounds fake but okay!” on a shirt. I would confuse so many people with it.

[saturnmortis]

(:3 っ)∋ <- seal

[neighbourhoodtwo]

happy sometimes you just want something so hard you have to lie about it so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute monday

[neighbourhoodtwo]

yeag

[inkpressedpetals]

[acollectionofas]

Extremely excellent, very very very autistic quote from Brennan Lee Mulligan:

"Curiosity is love for the world, and when you love something, you want to get to know it more. So when you share facts about crows or pterodactyls or whatever, what you are expressing is gratitude for the ability to exist in and come to understand the beauty of the world around you."

"When you tell someone that you don't like all the crow facts, you're...

"You're actually saying that you hate me. I am my crow facts."

[stuckinapril]

life is so hard when you’re a very lazy girl by nature but you also want to do a lot of things in your one wild and precious life

[energyprison]

speaking is a sort of playing where words are the toys

[meirimerens]

conversation i just had

[cryptonature]

I was lying in the leaf litter today when some moss spoke to me. "Excuse me, do you know the species of this fallen log beneath me?" asked the moss. "Hmm. No. Sorry, I'm a little fuzzy on logs," I said. "What a coincidence," said the moss. "I'm a little fuzzy on logs too."

[havingapoemwithyou]

Daylight Savings by Grace Q. Song

[greater-than-the-sword]

When you're a kid you just take trees for granted. Then when you get to be an adult you realize that a fully mature tree cannot be created in an amount of time that fits in a convenient landscaping timeframe for love nor money nor all the powers of science. Then you realize that people are very very very cavalier about chopping them down

[loveridden1999]

adult grief by louise glück

[axlakuma]

Sharks // oil on canvas

Konstantin Korobov

[girlsnighteverynight]

[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

[zwoelffarben]

"the reason you can't curry goodwill, or love, or hatred, or even disfavor is that we didn't have Horses for those."

Okay, so what I've decided to take away from this post, incorrectly or no, is that we can curry anything there's a horse for.

So in addition to Favor, we can curry Conquest, War, Famine, Pestilence, Polution, Death, and various other horses.