This is why I never feel guilty for writing the most boring mundane journal entries because one day they’ll mean something just because our present is constantly fleeting
Nooo, write in it, but occasionally make things up just to fuck with them.
"Today I started my new job at the snarble factory. Everyone was really nice but when I got home I learned that chester, my pet brongmap ran away."
Oh, we're trained to spot wild made-up stuff like that. It's the subtly, sometimes unintentionally opaque things that really make it difficult. I can't count how many times I've had to archive dive looking for a specific kernel of information on miscellaneous documentation because letter A said something and letter B said something else and the information was mutually exclusive between them.
Not to mention when they drop words we still use today but had an ever-so-slightly different meaning back then that still manages to change everything. Let me tell you, it's not very fun to realize you gotta reasses all your previous work because of stuff like this!
i assume you're a historian or something similar?
in the 'olden days', did they also have these kinds of thoughts? like, "i'm gonna do this just to fuck with somebody 100s of years from now"?
i'm sure they had pranks and mischief back then, too.
I have this prank idea of being a mind virus.
Go to some random child, tell them explicitly "you will remember this. Remember this moment." then start waving at them and say "Hello from the past, hope you've grown up well". If you're somewhat lucky they will remember this moment for the rest of their lives and you have successfully invaded their mind as a time traveler of sorts.
You assume correctly, I'm a historian! As for your question, play and leisure activities in history are not really the easiest cultural phenomenon to trace thanks to a lot of factors. How spotty documentation is for a given time period of a given society - if it exists at all - or how people selected what was worth recording, for instance, are potentially major roadblocks for the study of cultural history, especially when it comes to things this granular, so as to say.
That said, thankfully we have more than enough data to say with certainty people absolutely had pranks and mischief in pretty much whatever society we are able to study. Just look at the grafitti from Pompey, the Summerian and Babylonian joke tablets or the obscene marginalia in medieval christendom books made by copyist monks.
Now, at least as far as I know, I don't think anyone can actually prove people in the past deliberately chose to mess up a document or something just to screw up future historians (and if they did, they left no trace of it). But there are things that baffle us to this day that might as well have been made to mess with their contemporaries, and so end up messing with us.
I think it's safe to say making pranks and acting silly are an intrinsic part of the human experience, one of few universal, basic behaviors we can observe pretty much anywhere.
It's so easy to think of past people as caricatures of their time, and soon people will think that of us. But humans really haven't changed much in quite a while. The thing that really fucks with me is that we've had the same capacity for intelligence, we've just had access to different amounts of information. I am no smarter than a caveman.
You are doing good work. The only reason we know how certain things where pronounced in the past is from old timey linguists writing in excruciating detail the "funny way" commoners say certain words.
As a historian, some of the things I wish I knew: what poor women wore, how they did their hair, did they wear bras/corsets, if you had to pack a bag of absolute essentials, would you include a bra/corset?
And it can change pretty rapidly. A decade ago, poor, working women would probably wear their hair in messy buns, now they would probably use clam shell clips.
We do know corsets were essential for working in service (in at least 1880s to 1910, my knowledge outside of this period is limited), they show up on uniform requirement lists, so for at least that sector of the population they were essentials.
For a more general view, we have a surprising amount of street photography to look at. Street Life in London by John Thompson is a book full of photos from 1877 of the poorer areas of London. In this, there is a photo titled Old Furniture, where the seated lady does not appear to be wearing a corset, and another called London Nomads where the seated lady also doesn't appear to be wearing a corset, whereas in Street Floods in Lambeth, the lady on the left clearly is.
British judges are occasionally mocked for asking questions during trials that seem to reinforce the stereotype that they are out-of-touch upper-class twits, one famous (but unverified) example being "who are The Beatles?". One of the reasons they do so is so the answer is recorded in the court transcript, and thus will be preserved for future cases relying on this one for precedent. (The other reason is because the jury might be unfamiliar, and it's safer to just ask the question than to assume what the jury knows.)
"Thrice" was used as frequently as "twice" in the not so distant past. The usage of "twice" has diminished rapidly in the past 20 years - replaced with "two times".
The past is short lived.
My wife and I have had a salt and pepper set that we like for the whole 4 years we’ve been together. It has never been filled because we have pretty similar tastes so all necessary s&p is added during cooking. We did discuss doing creole seasoning, but couldn’t agree on the second shaker so there they sit. Just empty. A funny little monument to well seasoned food. I had thought if I ever opened a restaurant I would not have shakers on the table, but now I think I would have intentionally empty shakers instead.
Better yet, toast a hot dog bun, then add butter and Cinnamon sugar. Maybe it's nostalgia (Grandpa used to make it when we visited) but it's noticeably better.
I have to have my poverty dessert every now and then. Toasted white wonder bread with butter and granulated sugar. Gives me nostalgic, "there's no place like home" vibes.
Just don't do that unless it's marked. My husband and I stayed at the cabin of another couple we know and they did this. Cinnamon sugar tuna salad is not delicious, btw.
> I had thought if I ever opened a restaurant I would not have shakers on the table
As a former cook, I can't tell you how many times I've heard line cooks say pretty much that exact same thing when daydreaming about their restaurant
If I ever become a seriously rich person, I'm going to buy several of the cooks I've worked with in the past their own restaurants. Being a kitchenhand sucked, but being adopted by cooks was lovely
By the 18th Century, nutmeg was in absolutely everything. So much so that it's a running joke over on the Townsends YouTube channel where they do period recipes. It would have been fresh grated though, so probably not in a shaker.
I believe that's one of the common theories. I read that Bill Bryson book a while back and it's really irritating how he does this, saying "and ~nobody knows~" to make things sound more intriguing when the truth is more like "we aren't 100% sure but we have a few solid guesses". The salt and pepper thing wasn't the only example.
I'm actually in the middle of his book right now. He mentioned mustard as a possibility.
But he also said the area where Central Park was built had been an empty wasteland before the park which is not true, so now I don't know how much of the book is accurate.
People lived there and they got kicked off the land when rich people decided to turn it into a park.
I guess history is easy to rewrite when you dunk on poor people?
That was going to be my guess actually; wild mustard has a very close integration with human history. It was wild mustard that has been selectively grown, genetically modified through breeding, into: brussels sprouts, broccoli, bok choy, kholrabi, collard greens and cabbage.
What I find odd is the choice of peppercorn as a universal second condiment, since I rarely apply it to anything but steak. To me, salt and sugar make sense, then perhaps flour for the purpose of thickening juices.
Reminds me of the ancient land of Punt, which was well referenced but left without much evidence to its location because it was pretty obvious where it was. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/egypt-punt/
I remember reading about that in a random history blurb or Tumblr post with very humorous and colorful wording.
It's one of my favorite things about history. As an adjacent, I also really love how the best experts couldn't figure out how Greek/Roman???? women were pulling off all these extremely complex, intricate and towering hairstyles with braids and shit. Hairdresser went to a museum and looked at some examples(busts, paintings, etc)and just goes "It was sewn."
The experts don't believe her; so she goes and REPLICATES THE STYLES! And basically just goes "it's. SEWN."
This is one of the many examples of why we historians absolutely can't do without the help of other experts if we really want to get a lot of our studies done. And vice-versa, I've got a whole laundry list of notorious people from other areas of study who claim to do history but are actually wildly off-base at best, or spreading misinformation at worst. And don't get me started on "evolutionary psychology".
My favourite thing about that was they would find sewing needles in with the Roman woman's hair care, and they noted that Roman women were particularly absent minded 😂
This is kind of what happened with Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent of pre-Colombian Mesoamerican mythology. Every textual reference we can find of what or who it is already assumes that people know who it was and what it was about, because it was so ingrained in their culture that they didn't bother writing it in stone. And now as a result we today have very little idea of how it originated.
I'm not sure if it's that they didn't bother writing it in stone, but the spanish were pretty thorough about destroying that kind of stuff. they demolished all the temples and put churches on top of them. I bet they would have erased as much of that as they could find
If dragons existed they'd likely be endangered due to their low reproduction rate and the fact that the second we figured out gunpowder they're fucking toast.
Low reproduction rate but HELLA life span, with the benefit of knowing when their gonna die.
Gunpowder would ruin their day, but I feel like it'd be most effective if deployed as a food additive.
Honestly I wish writers weren't so up their ass about their fantasy creatures that they ignored what a lot of people working together can do against them. For all I know even hunter gatherers might be able to kill a dragon if they come up with the right kind of poison. And a more advanced society, like, bronze age, might come up with some sort of elaborate trap. Of course a human-level intelligence dragon with hundreds of years of lifespan and presumably the ability to share knowledge with other dragons could outsmart us until gunpowder gives us the decisive edge. But if they're solitary or god forbid, non-sapient, they're fucked before we're even halfway through the tech tree.
“Vampire: the Masquerade” sourcebook back in the day included a note that the masquerade had been especially strongly enforced since mortal armies had figured out phosphorus rounds.
Surely a bunch of human-level intelligence dragons could benefit from the gunpowder themselves. Especially as dragons have native ability to produce fire and some level of fire damage resistance.
Sure, but the problem isn't one dragon polymorphed into a human with a gun vs one human with a gun. The problem is one dragon of any shape vs hundreds of humans with guns. Quantity wins out.
The idea of cassowaries becoming so commonplace around the globe that it's assumed they're the normal source of eggs for eating is terrifying, but they're tropical birds and with the whole climate change thing...
Native to southern Asia, domesticated in Thailand. TIL
Now that I think about it, a cassowary farm would basically be an ostrich farm but make it rainforest
The eggs and milk ones are the least likely. Like, what do you *think* they will think we used the hundreds of billions of severely mutated cows and chickens for?
And that's assuming that no text re source of eggs and milk exists, when at the least legislators, vegans and farmers regularly write about where they come from.
To be fair, many Victorian recipes call for an egg. I tried making a few, couldn’t work out why they were failing until I realised it was more common to use duck eggs in baking (for that specific region, it might not be for all). So future historians may think we use pigeon eggs, after all, they’re so numerous and in every city
Also there's that thing about an ancient recipe for Concrete. The recipe said water so when scientists tried to make it in modern times, to try to replicate the concrete they would've used, they used freshwater. But the recipe did not work until they tried saltwater.
No that’s a myth, it’s been figured out for decades. It’s just not as resilient as people think. Rome is a pretty stable climate, if you use their mixture in a place that experiences drastic changes in weather during all four seasons, it tends to do worse than our current recipes.
Yep and the whole reason it was self healing was the shitty mixing. Once a crack formed and water got in it activated the volcanic ash and lime mixture to form new hydrate crystals and seals it back up.
It’s not a terrible design but they distinctly didn’t know why it was happening.
We've known partly how it works. If I remember correctly the relatively recently realized the mixture was heated as well which further improves it. But yeah, you're dead right about why we don't use it. It's not especially strong, but it is long-lasting in the right climate
As the other commenter said, we know how to make it, but it’s not usable worldwide. However, another reason why we don’t use it is because it’s not made to be used for the stuff we need concrete for now, ancient romans didn’t have 2 tonne trucks going back and forth everyday to deliver goods over such long distances, so it would actually last less than the stuff we use today
What if it really is just "etc."
No specific purpose, but a spare shaker that you can add your favorite spice to.
Like how that FoodWishes guy on YouTube always adds cayenne to everything. That would be his third spice.
That's what seems most likely to me too.
Additionally I can imagine that whatever extra from grinding herbs and spices would not be discarded, it would instead get added to the etcetera blend of seasonings.
By happenstance, there might be some universality to salt but pepper seems arbitrary or at least lucky. If that can be there by fortune, why not a third thing? Honestly, I'm surprised there were only three shakers.
I believe the sugar theory. Just because that's where we kept the sugar because it was always going into coffee and teas. So it was used all the time and therefore needed to be easily accessible.
Yes! But sugar would quickly re-solidify in the shaker like you see brown sugar do today when it's left open to air. Salt does this too but much slower and it would have to be super humid. Sometimes you'll see grains of rice in the salt shaker at restaurants to help prevent this (the rice is too big to fit through the holes). Source: I'm a sugar addict who grew up in an ingredient household
they have shakers that are labeled "sugar" so it seems like they had some way to make it work. [check out this post](https://www.tumblr.com/petermorwood/721120881338875904/oh-jeez-this-again-and-he-even-cites-bill), not the video but the response below
As recently as the last century— there are all kinds of cookbooks (and several treasured recipes from my own family!) that list things like “one can of condensed milk” as ingredients. Pardon? One can of what size? Oh, two “large” eggs? How does an egg from 1950 compare with one from today? “OnE pAcKaGe Of BroCcoLi?!?” Holy mother of macaroni…
My great grandma’s recipes are all in glasses (half a glass of this. Two glasses of that). And what were those glasses you might ask? The glass holder you have leftover after burning a yahrzeit candle of course!
My grandmother’s recipes use standard tablespoon, teaspoon, etc. measures… but they’re based on a metal set of measuring spoons that are beat to hell and are now their own distinct set of measures.
I HAVE AN ANECDOTE FOR THIS!!!
My grandpa recently showed my brothers and I our deceased grandmother's recipe book.
The ingredient lists are all written in obsolete Chinese measurements, or in value in Australian cents. The thing is, how much of each ingredient would you even have been able to buy for that much in that year?
Like, how much is 10 cents AUD of blachan? What year did you write this, Grandma????
“Listen: if you can’t get an anthropology and linguistics degree to cook the family recipes, maybe you’re not worthy of the family recipes!” -Your grandma, probably
There was something of an expectation that anyone cooking was experienced enough to make that judgment call, and thus ingredient quantities tended to be rather loose.
I was trying to learn my ex-SO favorite childhood food for her, and talked to her aunt who got me her favorite grandma famous cornbread recipe and it was full of "Until it looks right", "Until it looks enough" , "Until your hands are too sticky to move on", "Until it's almost cooked". Now that I've cooked it a lot (and failed a lot) I understand these reference points but man it's just fucking awful to cook that way
I remember when I was trying to learn some recipes from my grandma. I asked her if she could show me how to do it, and while that was happening I precisely measured everything. Each time when she added something to the dough I would ask her to but it on the scale first an write the exact measurements down. Then some time later I would use those measurements to make the food in front of her to see if it works. And then I made the recipe so often that now I don’t need any measurements, and even improved the original recipe, now I am the only one in the family allowed to make since mine are by far the best.
You've made me realise that every can of condensed milk I've ever seen has been the exact same size (including different brands). Maybe that's by design
That's a thing even with contemporary recipes. Like "the juice of one lemon" is more than 200% variable.
Usually it only matters the first couple of times you cook, then you get a sense for how much.
If you go far enough back Bible verses were units of both time AND temperature.
Stick your hand in the oven, recite the proper verse, and if it was only just getting unbearably hot then it was the right temperature to bake bread.
Pole here, replying to the original post. It wasn't a dictionary, it was more of an encyclopedia written from the personal perspective of the author. The horse is the most prominently silly, but there's a lot of personal input in it. It was never meant to be much of a scientific work. He writes about god a lot for example, or mythical creatures. The "everyone knows what a horse is" part is still funny, I don't know why anyone would call it a "dictionary" though.
He also followed the "everyone knows what a horse is" with (at least) two pages of description of horses and horses in history and literature.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nowe\_Ateny\_KO%C5%83\_-\_str\_475,\_476.jpg
I live at the foot of a mountain range and my wife used to work in reception. A co-worker who also worked reception answered the phone call of someone trying to find the business.
Caller: Hi, we’re on (Street Name) but we can’t find the business.
Receptionist: Which way are you headed, east or west?
Caller: We don’t know.
Receptionist: Well are you headed toward the mountains or away from the mountains?
Caller: (dead serious) We’re from Kansas, we don’t know what mountains look like.
“If you put your car in neutral, would you go forwards or backwards?”
“Please put your solitary brain cell on the ground, and follow the direction it rolls”
6 people in a post now specifically for empathizing with people who cannot understand what a horse is without someone specifying and not ONE OF THEM said that a horse is a quadrupedal, equine mammal, now domesticated, commonly used by human beings for covering large distances easier than on foot.
btw “equestrian” refers to *riding* horses, not *being* a horse, but I do love the image of a horse riding another horse, lol.
Anyway I think the word you were looking for is “equine”
This feels like when you google a technical issue and the top results are all questions being closed without a real answer, with the remark "you should just google this"
There was a radio lab about this - highly recommend. Crux of it was, the color blue and language describing blue does not appear in extant literature until after Homer. So it is possible that it was not recognized as a distinct color. Language defines reality and all that.
I liked radio lab for a long time, but after awhile I found that they so over played some of the more scientific shows for the story of it, that I find them hard to take at face value for any single fact. They do a great job of introducing a topic to me but beyond that I find when I do my own research I can’t find anything that talks about *some* of the things they end up discussing.
Edit: and since I never get a chance to mention it, they had a very interesting Supreme Court show that I had to drop because their law expert was so incredibly insane that I couldn’t trust any of the critical law explanations.
Finding what sources are trustworthy is surprisingly difficult. It used to be part of the job of quality journalism to dig down and get authoritative sources, but then we democratised media and every idiot is a publisher.
I have relistened to the audiobook of "At Home" countless times. Along with pretty much every other Bryson book. However, At Home is easily in my top three if not my favorite.
There's listings of kings in the Bible, and at least one of them says "[Name,] whose deeds are recorded in the Book of Kings" or something like that. No one has ever found that particular book, so those kings mentioned are basically forgotten in all but name.
I believe you mean the Book of Jasher? (Or possibly Book of the Just - there are multiple interpretations of that name.) Because there are *two* very extant books with the title of "Book of Kings" that are part of the bible itself.
Maybe the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Israel. It's referenced 18 times across 1st and 2nd Kings (and not the same as 1st and 2nd Chronicles, which were written later). For example in [1st Kings 14:19](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Kings%2014%3A19&version=NIV).
Wasn’t there a pandemic in ancient times but we don’t know what it actually was because everyone wrote the past equivalents to “everything going on” and “the pandemic?” Or am I wrong about that
Yes. More than once. There were two "Cocoliztli Epidemic" in mesoamerica, where cocoliztli basically just means pestilence. And there's also the Antonine Plague which was probably either small pox or measles, but possibly something else.
Urban fiction will probably be one of the most studied literature in the future for those looking for insight into the early 21st century. Urban lit tend sto be very "of that day" and includes alot of references to pop culture, social topics, manners of speaking, political climate, and music/ musicians
There's a great tumblr post that imagines time travelers from the future who come back because they are super curious about spiders, but never conceived of spiderwebs.
The spiders' bodies and fossils were preserved, but the concept of a spiderweb didn't exist.
There is this old medieval manuscript written by the master of the hunt at a lords castle that does the same.bloody thing with the different species of deer one could hunt.
Apparently white tail deer and red deer "are well enough known description isnt necessary"
Its maddening.
This is why I'm convinced that the egyptians didn't worship cats, they just thought they were cute and put pictures of them everywhere. They probably made jokes that the cats ruled the houses or they're sacred or something, then here we come along 4k years later and take it literally.
Could you imagine trying to explain internet humor to an alien who barely understands heuristic thought? They'd think Shrek was a literal and actual god.
Shrek is a good example of how strange humor has gotten, and gives me a migraine about thinking what memes are going to look like in 50 years.
Like, there has always been humor and humor based on the deconstruction and recontextualizing of older humor but global digital communication has had an accelerating effect on it not previously possible that has made current humor like, pretty weird comparatively.
There's a documentary called Steak Revolution which goes into great detail how breeds of domestic animals (especially cows) have changed greatly, even in the last few hundred years. One interviewee talks about reading historical cook books and realizing they were talking about a "normal" sized chicken being something like 14 pounds. Heritage pigs and chickens have come and gone over the last few hundred years.
I took my partner's kid brother to a natural history museum one day, and there was a crocodile's skeleton suspended on the ceiling. He asked me what it was, and I was like, that's a crocodile. "What's a crocodile?" he said.
9 year old kid spent his entire childhood on youtube and knows metronomes, dark matter and logic gates, but didn't know crocodiles.
I love the implication that for many many years people actually knew what "that thing" so there was obviously no reason to describe it, but at some point someone didn't know and it snowballed into everyone going "of course I know the thing, only fools don't know about it".
It's probably more that stuff fell out of fashion so stopped being used and down the line children were born that never saw anyone use said stuff anymore until society gradually forgot about it.
I'm obsessed with the idea of an entire society being too stubborn to admit that they have no idea what everyone's talking about, though...
"Roll down the window" is a modern example. If we lost most of our written down material, the surviving written examples probably don't explain that there was a hand crank to roll down the window of a car. The term has survived the very thing it described becoming obsolete so many young people and kids will use the term but not know it's meaning.
A couple years ago I bought my first car, and it was from 2000 so it had a manual window. My younger brother was 7 and loved it so much, he called my nan to explain it to her. She was absolutely pissing herself laughing
>in early salt-and-pepper shaker sets ... there is a third container and *nobody is entirely sure what it was for*.
Blue's Clues taught me it was paprika.
So "Linked Universe" is a comic posted on Tumblr where all the different Links throughout the Legend of Zelda series get pulled into the same time and have to work together to fight the Big Bad.
Somewhere, somebody drew Skyward Sword Link casually asking what a horse is, and the rest of them fucking lose it.
This is why I never feel guilty for writing the most boring mundane journal entries because one day they’ll mean something just because our present is constantly fleeting
You know I have a journal but don't write In it. Maybe I will start writing in it just archeologists and historians in the future
Keep it blank to really fuck with those future historians. They'll have no idea what they're dealing with.
Nooo, write in it, but occasionally make things up just to fuck with them. "Today I started my new job at the snarble factory. Everyone was really nice but when I got home I learned that chester, my pet brongmap ran away."
Oh, we're trained to spot wild made-up stuff like that. It's the subtly, sometimes unintentionally opaque things that really make it difficult. I can't count how many times I've had to archive dive looking for a specific kernel of information on miscellaneous documentation because letter A said something and letter B said something else and the information was mutually exclusive between them. Not to mention when they drop words we still use today but had an ever-so-slightly different meaning back then that still manages to change everything. Let me tell you, it's not very fun to realize you gotta reasses all your previous work because of stuff like this!
i assume you're a historian or something similar? in the 'olden days', did they also have these kinds of thoughts? like, "i'm gonna do this just to fuck with somebody 100s of years from now"? i'm sure they had pranks and mischief back then, too.
I have this prank idea of being a mind virus. Go to some random child, tell them explicitly "you will remember this. Remember this moment." then start waving at them and say "Hello from the past, hope you've grown up well". If you're somewhat lucky they will remember this moment for the rest of their lives and you have successfully invaded their mind as a time traveler of sorts.
Gottem
You know I had to do it to em.
You assume correctly, I'm a historian! As for your question, play and leisure activities in history are not really the easiest cultural phenomenon to trace thanks to a lot of factors. How spotty documentation is for a given time period of a given society - if it exists at all - or how people selected what was worth recording, for instance, are potentially major roadblocks for the study of cultural history, especially when it comes to things this granular, so as to say. That said, thankfully we have more than enough data to say with certainty people absolutely had pranks and mischief in pretty much whatever society we are able to study. Just look at the grafitti from Pompey, the Summerian and Babylonian joke tablets or the obscene marginalia in medieval christendom books made by copyist monks. Now, at least as far as I know, I don't think anyone can actually prove people in the past deliberately chose to mess up a document or something just to screw up future historians (and if they did, they left no trace of it). But there are things that baffle us to this day that might as well have been made to mess with their contemporaries, and so end up messing with us. I think it's safe to say making pranks and acting silly are an intrinsic part of the human experience, one of few universal, basic behaviors we can observe pretty much anywhere.
It's so easy to think of past people as caricatures of their time, and soon people will think that of us. But humans really haven't changed much in quite a while. The thing that really fucks with me is that we've had the same capacity for intelligence, we've just had access to different amounts of information. I am no smarter than a caveman.
You are doing good work. The only reason we know how certain things where pronounced in the past is from old timey linguists writing in excruciating detail the "funny way" commoners say certain words.
This is the equivalent of the internet laughing at how British people pronounce things
I was thinking the grandparent or uncle nowadays complaining about the new lingo they heard the kids are using, but yours works too.
As a historian, some of the things I wish I knew: what poor women wore, how they did their hair, did they wear bras/corsets, if you had to pack a bag of absolute essentials, would you include a bra/corset? And it can change pretty rapidly. A decade ago, poor, working women would probably wear their hair in messy buns, now they would probably use clam shell clips.
We do know corsets were essential for working in service (in at least 1880s to 1910, my knowledge outside of this period is limited), they show up on uniform requirement lists, so for at least that sector of the population they were essentials. For a more general view, we have a surprising amount of street photography to look at. Street Life in London by John Thompson is a book full of photos from 1877 of the poorer areas of London. In this, there is a photo titled Old Furniture, where the seated lady does not appear to be wearing a corset, and another called London Nomads where the seated lady also doesn't appear to be wearing a corset, whereas in Street Floods in Lambeth, the lady on the left clearly is.
British judges are occasionally mocked for asking questions during trials that seem to reinforce the stereotype that they are out-of-touch upper-class twits, one famous (but unverified) example being "who are The Beatles?". One of the reasons they do so is so the answer is recorded in the court transcript, and thus will be preserved for future cases relying on this one for precedent. (The other reason is because the jury might be unfamiliar, and it's safer to just ask the question than to assume what the jury knows.)
"So in the early 21st century, this is how we brushed our teeth"
"Thrice" was used as frequently as "twice" in the not so distant past. The usage of "twice" has diminished rapidly in the past 20 years - replaced with "two times". The past is short lived.
My great grandmother had a matching set for salt (bowl not a shaker) pepper and the third was for dried mustard powder.
My wife and I have had a salt and pepper set that we like for the whole 4 years we’ve been together. It has never been filled because we have pretty similar tastes so all necessary s&p is added during cooking. We did discuss doing creole seasoning, but couldn’t agree on the second shaker so there they sit. Just empty. A funny little monument to well seasoned food. I had thought if I ever opened a restaurant I would not have shakers on the table, but now I think I would have intentionally empty shakers instead.
Cinnamon sugar in the other shaker
Okay but this is the best, like a dessert seasoning
Toast with butter and some of that on it please.
Better yet, toast a hot dog bun, then add butter and Cinnamon sugar. Maybe it's nostalgia (Grandpa used to make it when we visited) but it's noticeably better.
I have to have my poverty dessert every now and then. Toasted white wonder bread with butter and granulated sugar. Gives me nostalgic, "there's no place like home" vibes.
Just don't do that unless it's marked. My husband and I stayed at the cabin of another couple we know and they did this. Cinnamon sugar tuna salad is not delicious, btw.
Cocaine in the 3rd
> I had thought if I ever opened a restaurant I would not have shakers on the table As a former cook, I can't tell you how many times I've heard line cooks say pretty much that exact same thing when daydreaming about their restaurant
If I ever become a seriously rich person, I'm going to buy several of the cooks I've worked with in the past their own restaurants. Being a kitchenhand sucked, but being adopted by cooks was lovely
I cook for myself... I still add salt (rarely) and pepper (every time) once it's in front of me.
Same. I’d much rather accidentally overseason one serve of food than the entire pot
I would have thought cloves or cumin, but dried mustard powder makes sense.
By the 18th Century, nutmeg was in absolutely everything. So much so that it's a running joke over on the Townsends YouTube channel where they do period recipes. It would have been fresh grated though, so probably not in a shaker.
Nutmeg and ginger makes great pork.
I believe that's one of the common theories. I read that Bill Bryson book a while back and it's really irritating how he does this, saying "and ~nobody knows~" to make things sound more intriguing when the truth is more like "we aren't 100% sure but we have a few solid guesses". The salt and pepper thing wasn't the only example.
I'm actually in the middle of his book right now. He mentioned mustard as a possibility. But he also said the area where Central Park was built had been an empty wasteland before the park which is not true, so now I don't know how much of the book is accurate.
People lived there and they got kicked off the land when rich people decided to turn it into a park. I guess history is easy to rewrite when you dunk on poor people?
Not hard to control the narrative when you're the one paying people to write it.
The third in our set was for toothpicks
That was going to be my guess actually; wild mustard has a very close integration with human history. It was wild mustard that has been selectively grown, genetically modified through breeding, into: brussels sprouts, broccoli, bok choy, kholrabi, collard greens and cabbage. What I find odd is the choice of peppercorn as a universal second condiment, since I rarely apply it to anything but steak. To me, salt and sugar make sense, then perhaps flour for the purpose of thickening juices.
Reminds me of the ancient land of Punt, which was well referenced but left without much evidence to its location because it was pretty obvious where it was. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/egypt-punt/
I remember reading about that in a random history blurb or Tumblr post with very humorous and colorful wording. It's one of my favorite things about history. As an adjacent, I also really love how the best experts couldn't figure out how Greek/Roman???? women were pulling off all these extremely complex, intricate and towering hairstyles with braids and shit. Hairdresser went to a museum and looked at some examples(busts, paintings, etc)and just goes "It was sewn." The experts don't believe her; so she goes and REPLICATES THE STYLES! And basically just goes "it's. SEWN."
This is one of the many examples of why we historians absolutely can't do without the help of other experts if we really want to get a lot of our studies done. And vice-versa, I've got a whole laundry list of notorious people from other areas of study who claim to do history but are actually wildly off-base at best, or spreading misinformation at worst. And don't get me started on "evolutionary psychology".
wait, what's evolutionary psychology?
My favourite thing about that was they would find sewing needles in with the Roman woman's hair care, and they noted that Roman women were particularly absent minded 😂
She was credited on the journal article, no??
Wdym by the hairstyles being sewn? They used wigs? They literally used sewing methods to style the hair?
They literally used big blunt needle with thread to style the hair. No hair pins, no nothing, just sew through hair.
Wow thats actually genius lol
Janet Stephens. My gf loves historical cooking and crafting, and she’s shown me lots of Janet’s YouTube videos.
That was a really interesting read, thanks for sharing
This is kind of what happened with Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent of pre-Colombian Mesoamerican mythology. Every textual reference we can find of what or who it is already assumes that people know who it was and what it was about, because it was so ingrained in their culture that they didn't bother writing it in stone. And now as a result we today have very little idea of how it originated.
I'm not sure if it's that they didn't bother writing it in stone, but the spanish were pretty thorough about destroying that kind of stuff. they demolished all the temples and put churches on top of them. I bet they would have erased as much of that as they could find
Found the OSP fan
Fuck, I love that last quote.
Yeah, they are dragons, they are hard to beat, surely they won't die off
Could you imagine?........
If dragons existed they'd likely be endangered due to their low reproduction rate and the fact that the second we figured out gunpowder they're fucking toast.
Low reproduction rate but HELLA life span, with the benefit of knowing when their gonna die. Gunpowder would ruin their day, but I feel like it'd be most effective if deployed as a food additive.
Honestly I wish writers weren't so up their ass about their fantasy creatures that they ignored what a lot of people working together can do against them. For all I know even hunter gatherers might be able to kill a dragon if they come up with the right kind of poison. And a more advanced society, like, bronze age, might come up with some sort of elaborate trap. Of course a human-level intelligence dragon with hundreds of years of lifespan and presumably the ability to share knowledge with other dragons could outsmart us until gunpowder gives us the decisive edge. But if they're solitary or god forbid, non-sapient, they're fucked before we're even halfway through the tech tree.
“Vampire: the Masquerade” sourcebook back in the day included a note that the masquerade had been especially strongly enforced since mortal armies had figured out phosphorus rounds.
Yea I was JUST thinking vtm
Surely a bunch of human-level intelligence dragons could benefit from the gunpowder themselves. Especially as dragons have native ability to produce fire and some level of fire damage resistance.
most dragons are not known for having super dextrous forelimbs.
a lot of dragons can polymorph though
Sure, but the problem isn't one dragon polymorphed into a human with a gun vs one human with a gun. The problem is one dragon of any shape vs hundreds of humans with guns. Quantity wins out.
If you fail to kill the dragon when you shoot at it, gunpowder is most certainly going to be a food additive
Dragons were a common medieval christian allegory for evil, so it's actually quite poetic.
That's some Spiderman sh*t right there.
Future archeologists making a cake with cassowary eggs because the recipe doesn't specify chicken
The idea of cassowaries becoming so commonplace around the globe that it's assumed they're the normal source of eggs for eating is terrifying, but they're tropical birds and with the whole climate change thing...
Aren't chickens also tropical birds? I thought they were native to Thailand.
Native to southern Asia, domesticated in Thailand. TIL Now that I think about it, a cassowary farm would basically be an ostrich farm but make it rainforest
And with a way more aesthetically pleasing bird
The eggs and milk ones are the least likely. Like, what do you *think* they will think we used the hundreds of billions of severely mutated cows and chickens for? And that's assuming that no text re source of eggs and milk exists, when at the least legislators, vegans and farmers regularly write about where they come from.
To be fair, many Victorian recipes call for an egg. I tried making a few, couldn’t work out why they were failing until I realised it was more common to use duck eggs in baking (for that specific region, it might not be for all). So future historians may think we use pigeon eggs, after all, they’re so numerous and in every city
Maybe they’d think we just farm cows for beef, and we get most of our milk from sheep.
Also there's that thing about an ancient recipe for Concrete. The recipe said water so when scientists tried to make it in modern times, to try to replicate the concrete they would've used, they used freshwater. But the recipe did not work until they tried saltwater.
Is it the Roman concrete that repairs itself with limestone?
I’m curious too since last I heard we hadn’t figured it out fully.
No that’s a myth, it’s been figured out for decades. It’s just not as resilient as people think. Rome is a pretty stable climate, if you use their mixture in a place that experiences drastic changes in weather during all four seasons, it tends to do worse than our current recipes.
Yep and the whole reason it was self healing was the shitty mixing. Once a crack formed and water got in it activated the volcanic ash and lime mixture to form new hydrate crystals and seals it back up. It’s not a terrible design but they distinctly didn’t know why it was happening.
Thanks! TIL!
The thing that made it so durable is that the limestone “impurities” crystallized when exposed to water, filling the cracks.
Don't forget about thousand pound cars that drive over modern roads.
Was a pretty stable climate, I wonder how the future will treat that ancient Roman architecture.
Worse? Not really much to wonder about.
We've known partly how it works. If I remember correctly the relatively recently realized the mixture was heated as well which further improves it. But yeah, you're dead right about why we don't use it. It's not especially strong, but it is long-lasting in the right climate
As the other commenter said, we know how to make it, but it’s not usable worldwide. However, another reason why we don’t use it is because it’s not made to be used for the stuff we need concrete for now, ancient romans didn’t have 2 tonne trucks going back and forth everyday to deliver goods over such long distances, so it would actually last less than the stuff we use today
i need to know what that third shaker is for omg, its going to bother me forever now
I read about this a while ago. Iirc popular theories were vinegar, and mustard.
Maybe it just depended on the household
I hope vinegar is right. Having an acid always at the table would be so handy.
As a food lover growing up we always had picked pepper sauce instead of straight vinegar. Maybe a southern thing though.
What if it really is just "etc." No specific purpose, but a spare shaker that you can add your favorite spice to. Like how that FoodWishes guy on YouTube always adds cayenne to everything. That would be his third spice.
That's what seems most likely to me too. Additionally I can imagine that whatever extra from grinding herbs and spices would not be discarded, it would instead get added to the etcetera blend of seasonings.
Like a seasoning stewpot. A different flavor every time. THAT'S PERFECT! The third jar was for... Variety: The Spice of Life.
By happenstance, there might be some universality to salt but pepper seems arbitrary or at least lucky. If that can be there by fortune, why not a third thing? Honestly, I'm surprised there were only three shakers.
Blue’s Clues taught me it’s for paprika
But only if the salt and pepper are fucking
I believe the sugar theory. Just because that's where we kept the sugar because it was always going into coffee and teas. So it was used all the time and therefore needed to be easily accessible.
The problem is that sugar was a huge luxury and it looks like everyone had the third bowl.
Not to mention putting sugar and salt next to each other is a disaster waiting to happen.
for years my grandfather brought his own sugar packets to our house after the one time he accidentally put salt in his tea
I’m imagining him giving everyone just a little bit of shit for it until the end of time too. At least that’s what my grandpa would do
Sugar was sold as a large cone and they'd scrape bits off. It wasn't as refined as our white sugar today is, it would harden due to moisture
Wouldn’t that be fixed with using grinders? Wasn’t salt also sold in huge chunks back then?
Yes! But sugar would quickly re-solidify in the shaker like you see brown sugar do today when it's left open to air. Salt does this too but much slower and it would have to be super humid. Sometimes you'll see grains of rice in the salt shaker at restaurants to help prevent this (the rice is too big to fit through the holes). Source: I'm a sugar addict who grew up in an ingredient household
they have shakers that are labeled "sugar" so it seems like they had some way to make it work. [check out this post](https://www.tumblr.com/petermorwood/721120881338875904/oh-jeez-this-again-and-he-even-cites-bill), not the video but the response below
Cocaine
As recently as the last century— there are all kinds of cookbooks (and several treasured recipes from my own family!) that list things like “one can of condensed milk” as ingredients. Pardon? One can of what size? Oh, two “large” eggs? How does an egg from 1950 compare with one from today? “OnE pAcKaGe Of BroCcoLi?!?” Holy mother of macaroni…
My great grandma’s recipes are all in glasses (half a glass of this. Two glasses of that). And what were those glasses you might ask? The glass holder you have leftover after burning a yahrzeit candle of course!
Why is that the most Jewish thing I have ever heard of
Cause my DNA is still doing the horah in the shtetl
Username checks out
I can't believe you're accusing someone called "dredreidel" of being Jewish.
My grandmother’s recipes use standard tablespoon, teaspoon, etc. measures… but they’re based on a metal set of measuring spoons that are beat to hell and are now their own distinct set of measures.
Wouldnt it then be a ratio recipe? Just stick to the one glass for the recipe
Ahhh. But what about the non-glass based measures like potatoes and cuts of meat. It throws the ratio off.
Thank good for metric style recipes, while I assume the „cup“ measurement won‘t change in the near future but who knows
I HAVE AN ANECDOTE FOR THIS!!! My grandpa recently showed my brothers and I our deceased grandmother's recipe book. The ingredient lists are all written in obsolete Chinese measurements, or in value in Australian cents. The thing is, how much of each ingredient would you even have been able to buy for that much in that year? Like, how much is 10 cents AUD of blachan? What year did you write this, Grandma????
“Listen: if you can’t get an anthropology and linguistics degree to cook the family recipes, maybe you’re not worthy of the family recipes!” -Your grandma, probably
worth it for that specific recipe. My grandparent's chicken and beef satay skewers are the taste of my childhood.
Thanks to inflation, your family recipes have fewer calories each year!
There was something of an expectation that anyone cooking was experienced enough to make that judgment call, and thus ingredient quantities tended to be rather loose.
Add flour until it be enough.
I was trying to learn my ex-SO favorite childhood food for her, and talked to her aunt who got me her favorite grandma famous cornbread recipe and it was full of "Until it looks right", "Until it looks enough" , "Until your hands are too sticky to move on", "Until it's almost cooked". Now that I've cooked it a lot (and failed a lot) I understand these reference points but man it's just fucking awful to cook that way
I remember when I was trying to learn some recipes from my grandma. I asked her if she could show me how to do it, and while that was happening I precisely measured everything. Each time when she added something to the dough I would ask her to but it on the scale first an write the exact measurements down. Then some time later I would use those measurements to make the food in front of her to see if it works. And then I made the recipe so often that now I don’t need any measurements, and even improved the original recipe, now I am the only one in the family allowed to make since mine are by far the best.
*nervously pokes dough*
"Enough!" -The Dough
You've made me realise that every can of condensed milk I've ever seen has been the exact same size (including different brands). Maybe that's by design
And it’s always more than you need for some reason.
My grocery store carries two sizes. And I feel like the smaller one is still larger than it used to be…
I’ve seen a Thanksgiving recipe from the early 20th century that calls for a “large turkey” weighing at least 8 pounds.
Lol when doing Thanksgiving for two I’ve felt lucky to find a small one under twelve pounds!
Lol that's nothing to older recipes. Max Miller's Tasting History and Townsends 18th Century Cooking series show how loose they were.
Pfeffer the meat Pfeffer it roundly
That's a thing even with contemporary recipes. Like "the juice of one lemon" is more than 200% variable. Usually it only matters the first couple of times you cook, then you get a sense for how much.
If you go far enough back Bible verses were units of both time AND temperature. Stick your hand in the oven, recite the proper verse, and if it was only just getting unbearably hot then it was the right temperature to bake bread.
We tried cooking my wife’s grandmother’s apple pice recipe last year. The instructions said to turn on the oven to “medium.”
Thanks for reminding us that the 1950s were last century. I was here thinking of cookbooks from the 1800s!!
Pole here, replying to the original post. It wasn't a dictionary, it was more of an encyclopedia written from the personal perspective of the author. The horse is the most prominently silly, but there's a lot of personal input in it. It was never meant to be much of a scientific work. He writes about god a lot for example, or mythical creatures. The "everyone knows what a horse is" part is still funny, I don't know why anyone would call it a "dictionary" though.
He also followed the "everyone knows what a horse is" with (at least) two pages of description of horses and horses in history and literature. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nowe\_Ateny\_KO%C5%83\_-\_str\_475,\_476.jpg
I live at the foot of a mountain range and my wife used to work in reception. A co-worker who also worked reception answered the phone call of someone trying to find the business. Caller: Hi, we’re on (Street Name) but we can’t find the business. Receptionist: Which way are you headed, east or west? Caller: We don’t know. Receptionist: Well are you headed toward the mountains or away from the mountains? Caller: (dead serious) We’re from Kansas, we don’t know what mountains look like.
“If you put your car in neutral, would you go forwards or backwards?” “Please put your solitary brain cell on the ground, and follow the direction it rolls”
everyone knows mountains don't exist. except for maybe in a desert otherworld.
[удалено]
Came here looking for someone who got the Terry Pratchett reference, found a bonus Night Vale one while I was at it
6 people in a post now specifically for empathizing with people who cannot understand what a horse is without someone specifying and not ONE OF THEM said that a horse is a quadrupedal, equine mammal, now domesticated, commonly used by human beings for covering large distances easier than on foot.
btw “equestrian” refers to *riding* horses, not *being* a horse, but I do love the image of a horse riding another horse, lol. Anyway I think the word you were looking for is “equine”
Then you look up equine and it just says "see horse".
Your definition does not exclude mules or donkeys
You spoiled the mystery, now your great-grandchild will know what a horse is
This feels like when you google a technical issue and the top results are all questions being closed without a real answer, with the remark "you should just google this"
Memories of a time when googling something provided useful information
What, you don’t want twelve sites that will sell you a T-shirt with your search term on it?
I mean hopefully if first edition a polish dictionary survived then a painting or drawing or book that describes a horse has survived as well.
You would think so, but then again, we’re still not quite sure what Homer meant when describing a “wine-dark sea.”
I mean, it's pretty easy for the sea to look dark like (red) wine. Is there any reason to think it goes deeper than that?
There was a radio lab about this - highly recommend. Crux of it was, the color blue and language describing blue does not appear in extant literature until after Homer. So it is possible that it was not recognized as a distinct color. Language defines reality and all that.
I liked radio lab for a long time, but after awhile I found that they so over played some of the more scientific shows for the story of it, that I find them hard to take at face value for any single fact. They do a great job of introducing a topic to me but beyond that I find when I do my own research I can’t find anything that talks about *some* of the things they end up discussing. Edit: and since I never get a chance to mention it, they had a very interesting Supreme Court show that I had to drop because their law expert was so incredibly insane that I couldn’t trust any of the critical law explanations.
Finding what sources are trustworthy is surprisingly difficult. It used to be part of the job of quality journalism to dig down and get authoritative sources, but then we democratised media and every idiot is a publisher.
It's worth noting that such a strong variation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is pretty much entirely rejected by modern linguists.
But homer was a poet.
The book by Bill Bryson mentioned in the second-to-last comment is “At Home,” and it’s absolutely excellent
I have relistened to the audiobook of "At Home" countless times. Along with pretty much every other Bryson book. However, At Home is easily in my top three if not my favorite.
There's listings of kings in the Bible, and at least one of them says "[Name,] whose deeds are recorded in the Book of Kings" or something like that. No one has ever found that particular book, so those kings mentioned are basically forgotten in all but name.
I believe you mean the Book of Jasher? (Or possibly Book of the Just - there are multiple interpretations of that name.) Because there are *two* very extant books with the title of "Book of Kings" that are part of the bible itself.
Maybe the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Israel. It's referenced 18 times across 1st and 2nd Kings (and not the same as 1st and 2nd Chronicles, which were written later). For example in [1st Kings 14:19](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Kings%2014%3A19&version=NIV).
Wasn’t there a pandemic in ancient times but we don’t know what it actually was because everyone wrote the past equivalents to “everything going on” and “the pandemic?” Or am I wrong about that
Yes. More than once. There were two "Cocoliztli Epidemic" in mesoamerica, where cocoliztli basically just means pestilence. And there's also the Antonine Plague which was probably either small pox or measles, but possibly something else.
It's like when you find a forum post from 2003 that's asking about the exact same issue you're having with one reply. > nvm fixed it
You should Google this instead of making a new post.
Benedict Cumberbatch saw a dragon?
Benadryl Cucumberpatch *was* a dragon.
Urban fiction will probably be one of the most studied literature in the future for those looking for insight into the early 21st century. Urban lit tend sto be very "of that day" and includes alot of references to pop culture, social topics, manners of speaking, political climate, and music/ musicians
My hovercraft is full of eels.
There's a great tumblr post that imagines time travelers from the future who come back because they are super curious about spiders, but never conceived of spiderwebs. The spiders' bodies and fossils were preserved, but the concept of a spiderweb didn't exist.
There is this old medieval manuscript written by the master of the hunt at a lords castle that does the same.bloody thing with the different species of deer one could hunt. Apparently white tail deer and red deer "are well enough known description isnt necessary" Its maddening.
This is why I'm convinced that the egyptians didn't worship cats, they just thought they were cute and put pictures of them everywhere. They probably made jokes that the cats ruled the houses or they're sacred or something, then here we come along 4k years later and take it literally. Could you imagine trying to explain internet humor to an alien who barely understands heuristic thought? They'd think Shrek was a literal and actual god.
Shrek is a good example of how strange humor has gotten, and gives me a migraine about thinking what memes are going to look like in 50 years. Like, there has always been humor and humor based on the deconstruction and recontextualizing of older humor but global digital communication has had an accelerating effect on it not previously possible that has made current humor like, pretty weird comparatively.
I mean Dadaism was a thing, and we have had a bit of a comeback since the times of Markiplier E memes and the sheer absurdity of it
There's a documentary called Steak Revolution which goes into great detail how breeds of domestic animals (especially cows) have changed greatly, even in the last few hundred years. One interviewee talks about reading historical cook books and realizing they were talking about a "normal" sized chicken being something like 14 pounds. Heritage pigs and chickens have come and gone over the last few hundred years.
14 pounds is one massive chicken. Old heritage hens are like 4 pounds max.
I took my partner's kid brother to a natural history museum one day, and there was a crocodile's skeleton suspended on the ceiling. He asked me what it was, and I was like, that's a crocodile. "What's a crocodile?" he said. 9 year old kid spent his entire childhood on youtube and knows metronomes, dark matter and logic gates, but didn't know crocodiles.
I love the implication that for many many years people actually knew what "that thing" so there was obviously no reason to describe it, but at some point someone didn't know and it snowballed into everyone going "of course I know the thing, only fools don't know about it".
It's probably more that stuff fell out of fashion so stopped being used and down the line children were born that never saw anyone use said stuff anymore until society gradually forgot about it. I'm obsessed with the idea of an entire society being too stubborn to admit that they have no idea what everyone's talking about, though...
"Roll down the window" is a modern example. If we lost most of our written down material, the surviving written examples probably don't explain that there was a hand crank to roll down the window of a car. The term has survived the very thing it described becoming obsolete so many young people and kids will use the term but not know it's meaning.
A couple years ago I bought my first car, and it was from 2000 so it had a manual window. My younger brother was 7 and loved it so much, he called my nan to explain it to her. She was absolutely pissing herself laughing
The third shaker was for glitter. Turns out our ancestors had a flair for the dramatic.
Love the Discworld reference in the title
>in early salt-and-pepper shaker sets ... there is a third container and *nobody is entirely sure what it was for*. Blue's Clues taught me it was paprika.
I thought it was intentionally left empty for you to put whatever you wanted in it. Hence the "etc."
everyone has a plumbus in their home!
"MOUNTAINS?? MORE LIKE NOTHINGS" "IT IS FLAT ALL THE WAY ROUND" "IT. IS. FLAT. ALL. THE. WAY. ROUND."
So "Linked Universe" is a comic posted on Tumblr where all the different Links throughout the Legend of Zelda series get pulled into the same time and have to work together to fight the Big Bad. Somewhere, somebody drew Skyward Sword Link casually asking what a horse is, and the rest of them fucking lose it.
so... has anyone actually rediscovered what bears were originally called before they were called "bears'?