Microblog Memes
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
ostrachise
Huh? I thoght ancient greeks played with the idea of democracy but were mostly monarchistic?
Athens was a democracy, at least for a little bit
ostracheese
Mmmm. Cheese from ostrich milk
The weird thing about the origin of the word sandwich is that everyone had been eating them for centuries, but one day the Earl of Sandwich orders one and they say, "it takes too long to say bread-and-meat, let's just call it a sandwich."
By the way, no one knows for sure the etymology of 'squid.'
There are a bunch of animal names like that. Notably "dog" and "chicken" just showed up without any real source. In middle English we have hounds, and fowls/cocks/hens. It's strange for domestic animals that have been around forever to get renamed afor no apparent reason.
Huh, I just assumed chicken was chick+hen
I could've swore dog came from the old Scottish word dug. Which was another word for dog
not true, squid come from squyrde
I don't know what "squyrde" is, but it doesn't show up in any etymological source I've ever seen.
For example:
squid (n.)
"ten-armed marine mollusk, cuttlefish," 1610s, a word of unknown origin. Klein's sources suggest it is a sailors' variant of squirt and so called for the "ink" it jets.
Yes. Thats where squyrde comes from
Squyrde comes from Squirtle
I'd heard the sandwich story before, but had no clew about some of the others!
Surely, the clew is the corner of the sail where the sheet attaches, but that isn't important right now
"Stop calling me Shirley."
Sandwiches are named after a Welsh peasant dish that originally consisted of witch meat between two bricks of baked sand. It was terrible and offered little nutritional value, but was very popular due to the great availability of witch meat and lack of any real alternatives for nourishment.
I don't know enough Welsh to refute this
Additional fun fact: "sandwich" is a degraded version of the original Welsh spelling, which is "syynndwrrrccchhchch," and which was originally pronounced "klerb."
Onomatopoeia is itself an onomatopoeia because that's the sound it makes when you say the word.
That's how most words work though?
Not in fucking english lol
Welll my friend Tony goes by the nickname Ptoniegh, so he can probably back you up
All of the best ones
The sandwich is named for the sound of gargling dry white bread and overly processed deli meats that sandwich eaters made before the invention of garlic aoli.
Anyone else picture a drooling Homer Simpson?
Etymology of the word gargoyle, for anyone else who read the linked list in its entirety and found that gargoyle is not on it:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/gargoyle
Rather than the sound of water, it seems to refer to the throat of the statue through which water passes, which sounds like gargle in several languages. Several sites say it's an onomatopoeia for the statue gargling water but I can't find that reference specifically, except that the root words for gargle from Latin might be an onomatopoeia for the sound of gargling.
If the statue is purely ornamental without the function for water to pass through it, it's called a grotesque, chimera, or boss, so obviously I'm going to call them all bosses now.
Garganta means throat in Spanish, so I've learnt something about the origins of that word now :)
Like a boss!
Haha, I really want to show someone around New York or some larger city and point up and just be like "and you can see four bosses up there" and then get to explain what I mean.
I wonder if those lions in front of libraries are bosses too, or if bosses have to be rooftop statues?