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Fish Stuff

@koilungfish / koilungfish.tumblr.com

My favourite paperwork boyfriends meet for the first time in a given random AU

Zentangling to my heart's content :'3 some WIP found here [x]

That background is stunning :)

went to miami to recover father sotirios. and made some new friends.

these animals... they are wise. I recruited them to avenge my dear brother. I was then escorted out of the sea world.

Better than the 1596 Marseille dolphin exorcism I suppose.

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In 1596 dolphins were infesting the port of Marseille. Back in those days, y’see, dolphins didn’t have the cuddly image they enjoy today. They were pests and were causing damage.

So the cardinal of Avignon sent the bishop of Cavaillon to do something about them. In front of a huge crowd, the bishop sprinkled some holy water into the waters of the port and told the dolphins to begone. Whereupon the dolphins indeed turned tail in terror and fled, and were never seen again.

Still not as dramatic as Saint Bernard excommunicating the flies though.

What happened to the flies?

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux built a monastery in 1124, but it was plagued by flies. So the good saint promptly excommunicated them. By the next day the flied had died in such quantities that they had to be shoveled out.

Still not as nutty as the Basel rooster trial though.

*everyone in unison* um what rooster trial?

In 1474, a rooster in Basel did the heinous and unspeakable act of laying an egg. As everyone knows, an egg laid by a rooster will hatch into a basilisk (or cockatrice).

So to avoid the creation of a cockatrice (or basilisk), the rooster was tried, found guilty, and burned at the stake along with its egg. A huge crowd was present.

The “rooster” in this case was likely a hen that had developed male characteristics (it happens).

Still not as properly legal as the Savigny pig trial though.

Ok, clearly you want an excuse to talk about the pig thing, and I now DESPERATELY want to hear about the pig thing, so PLEASE tell us about the Pig Thing.

In 1457 a sow killed Jehan Martin, a five-year-old boy in Savigny. For that crime she was put on trial and judged guilty, and sentenced to be hanged from a tree.

Her piglets, however, were judged to have been innocent of the murder, and so were returned to the owner, with the caveat that he had to surrender them to the law if they were later found to have eaten any of the boy.

Not to be confused with a whole bunch of other, similar porcine trials.

I won’t mention the 1454 excommunication of eels in Lake Geneva then.

the seaquarium of miami banned me from visiting for life if anyone even cares.

TIL that the English word “Lord” in the sense of the head of an estate comes from an Old English word of Germanic origins, hlāfweard, later hlāford, later lord

Normally I wouldn’t remark on my romps through etymology, but “hlafweard” is a compound of hlaf, or loaf, and weard, which means guardian (see also Ward or Warden, etc). Meaning that when you call someone a lord you are calling him an esteemed keeper of the bread. 

HEY THERE BREADBOX PETER WIMSEY. LOAF GUARD PALPATINE. BREAD CLIP VETINARI. 

Lady also derives from hlaf, but in this case hlafdige or bread kneader. She makes the bread, he monitors it. Women have to do all the work as usual. 

Now, the reason I was looking this up was that I wanted to develop a gender-neutral analogue to lord/lady; there are analogues already out there naturally, but the Shivadh must be different and anyway I didn’t like the ones I’d seen suggested online. 

Given that the origins of Lord and Lady aren’t all that strongly gendered anyway (they’re about what the person does, not what their gender is), I decided that if a woman is a bread-kneader and a man is a bread-guarder, a nonbinary person should be A BREAD EATER, which would be Hlafetan.  

Thus I present to you the gender-neutral analogue to Lord or Lady: Ledan.