my new swimming instructor is called Phil and he is one of the most Phil i have ever met in my life
(i like him a lot, he is fiercely precise about fundamental swimming technique)
found a thingy
my shoggoth: …and then some rabbi convinced Oliver Cromwell of like, a sort of reverse Christian Zionism, where instead of needing all the Jews in one country before you’re allowed to have an apocalypse, you have to have some Jews in every country.
my shoggoth: Protestants are very easy to convince that their problems can be solved by optimising Jew distribution. some day someone will figure out the math…
me: but what if it’s logarithmic?
my shoggoth: the key point is we’re not bright enough to work it out for ourselves, we need a crank rabbi to come in with a convincing argument.
Good morning to the trans man loudly slamming his girlfriend in the bunk above convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, and ONLY the trans man loudly slamming his girlfriend in the bunk above convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell
Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?
Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?
So many particulars.
So many questions.
So I just went through three notebooks to find this, because I knew it was there.
I was at the ROM, about six years ago, at a special exhibit on Babylon. And there was a brick, formerly part of a palace. And Nebuchadnezzar, the one who built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, had had his name in cuneiform stamped on every single brick, to emphasize that he had built it.
And on this one, a workman had carved his own name, Zabina’, into the block too, in Aramaic. Here’s the brick. It’s 2600 years old.
Guys we gotta up our game the Georgians said fuck more than us
Having looked through historic googlebooks many a time and been frustrated by how difficult it is to search in this time period, this chart is most certainly due to the algorithm not properly picking up the “Long S” which was an f-like character used in place of an s especially in 17th and 18th century printing.
The rules of when the short and long s’s are used are somewhat complicated to modern people, but they are almost always at the beginning of words, never at the end, and if there is a double s sometimes they are combined and sometimes not:
99% of the time the word actually being used is “suck” or “sucking.” It actually shows up a lot as a word used to describe babies who were still nursing. In texts from this period the word “suck” will almost always read as “fuck.” This makes some of these auto-transcriptions absolutely brilliant in hindsight:
If you search for the word “fuck” in googlebooks within this time frame, you get hundreds of pages of entries like this. For example, this Shakespeare anthology:
This is not to say that people in the 18th century didn’t find this hilarious, I’m sure they did, but f-bombs were not being dropped in classic literature at the time. If they do show up, like in this 1785 slang dictionary: it is almost always bleeped out:
The other 1% of the fucks in 18th century books are, of course, not bleeped out because they are in Ye Olde Porn, of which there is a surprising amount on googlebooks.
I should also note if it wasn’t clear that the immense dropoff just after 1800 is when the long s stopped being used in print, and the reemergence was in the mid-late 20th century when people DID start dropping f-bombs in literature
Postcard: “Christ died for our Dunkin’ Donuts,” 1994, Folder 29, Box 1, William Rosenberg Papers, 1940-2002, MC 187, Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH, USA.
my brother started calling our cat “doobie brother” which he then lengthened to “dubious brother” and has since morphed into “brother dubious” like he’s some sort of fucked up little monk
mags // 33 // существо среднего рода // 404 preferred pronouns not found (current frontrunner: *throws up hands in frustration and mumbles vaguely about how singular they will do I guess*) // "better than a lot of people (and some cats) (at being a cat)" - @someofthemusic //
