Unsound Asleep @unsoundasleep - Tumblr Blog

tag guide

The tags in use and planned for use on this blog are under the cut! (This list is a WIP)

La Mode, Pl. 211, 18 février 1832, Paris. Capote ornée d'une plume frimatée. Robe de velours brodée en soie et garnie de martre. Manchon brodé. Manteau de cachemire Français. Digital Collections of the Los Angeles Public Library

#visual reference #dress for women #dress 1825 to 1850

tenlittlebullets

What’s better than a fully annotated online edition of the Brick? A fully annotated online edition of the Brick where clicking on any word will bring you to a list of every other place it occurs in the book.

Happy Barricade Day, fandom. Go to town.

hernaniste-blog

Holy cow.

(Warning that it’s French, which is probably as it should be for this type of resource, but will be less useful to many people. Win some, lose some.)

#les miserables #in french #linked resource #intratext

butterflypeaflowertea

trees are very 🥺 because sometimes i’ll stand under the shade of a tree and look up at it and it’ll sway its branches about in the wind and i’m like oh my God i’m alive and YOU’RE alive. we are alive together and made up of the same starry stuff and standing right next to each other in this moment on this earth. do u feel it when i reach out and press my hand to your trunk? can you hear me? i think you’re so neat. and then the sunlight filters through its leaves just so and that lovely green color leaves me dazzled. it’s just very nice to be an alive thing next to a different sort of alive thing

#reincarnated xerxes has just sung ombra mai fu onto my dash #what a marvelous day

romanceyourdemons

17th century european philosophers are so funny, they’ll be like “my aim herein is to discourse upon the nature of that which we call ‘civilization,’ and more generally that which we call ‘civil.’ the finger, as all can perceive, is a certain gland growing from the tissue of the arm, which, when acted upon by the electrical motion of the soul, doth exhibit such selfsame actions as does the worm; and therefore we may surmise that the worm is made of the same substance as the finger, or rather the finger the worm” and they just go on talking about fingers in a deeply incorrect but worryingly rational way for another 20 pages

#european enlightenment #no no let him speak

history-of-fashion

ab. 1750 Bodice (France)

dark green silk fabric, Gros de Tours with cream-colored pattern in taffeta weave, linen

(Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin)

#visual reference #dress for women #dress 1750 to 1775

contemptible-scoundrel

THE FRENCH FUJOSHI: and you will put ze tips of your penise togezher, oui? and you will insert yourself into 'iz boyhole, oui?

contemptible-scoundrel

#OH MON GAWDDD MAIS QUE VA DIRE JEEZUSS CHRAÏST S'ILS SE TOUCHENT LE YEEHAW #never will I be blessed with another such sublime caricature in all mah born dayz

history-of-fashion

1639-1640 Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck - Portrait of Andries Stilte

(Columbus Museum of Art)

#visual reference #dress for men #dress 1625 to 1650

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