Wild Things Belong To No One

Wren-she/they, 25 Mostly my ramblings, birds, bird dogs, horses, and general chaos

[woodwool]

severely deficient in whatever vitamin makes u a person

[shecallsmewildling]

Just got therapist prescribed arts and crafts time

[thecryptkeeper]

i know the way people talk about their pets now is probably how we’ve been doing it for all of history. a cat owner in ancient rome saw their cat lounging on the dining pillows and commented “he thinks himself to be the senator claudius 🤣”

[shecallsmewildling]

Today’s morning drama outside my office window involved a group of buzzards/turkey vultures defending likely eggs laid in a tree stump from an interloping crow. Definitely more entertaining than work today.

[shecallsmewildling]

The face of a man who has been betrayed and lured into the bathroom under the pretense of snacks only to find a bath waiting for him…

[shecallsmewildling]

I will insert a break here in case anyone is not interested as the pictures may not be for everyone but I got to watch my friend (licensed fur harvester) skin a bobcat that was roadkill near us recently, very very cool!

It was a small female, juvenile we believe. It’s nice to see that she won’t go to waste rotting in a ditch. Not sure what my friend will do with the pelt, she’s tanning it currently.

[goth-queen]

[petaltexturedskies]

Leila Chatti, from “The Moment When a Feeling Enters” in Wildness Before Something Sublime

[carolsturka]

[shecallsmewildling]

My OG child turns 24 in a couple weeks! And I’ll have had her for 10 years this summer! She’s living the semi feral retired life and loving it.

[geeky-fuckery]

[shecallsmewildling]

Someone was so anxious about puppy class she gave herself ✨stress colitis✨ and multiple days of explosive diarrhea…

[shecallsmewildling]

We start AKC STAR class tonight with the local kennel club path to CGC classes! I think there’s only one other dog in our class which is definitely more her speed so that’s good!

[alecstasy]

my anonymous friend sent me this and i thought this was really beautiful

[shecallsmewildling]

Boring married people Saturday landscaping projects! I guess over the years of my husband’s grandparents not being able to maintain it the moles had pushed a bunch of the dirt up underneath and done a bunch of damage but it’s ready for pollinator plants now!

[jager-bruder]

[queen-scribbles]

[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.