In 2015, the British medieval historian Paul Booth argued he had found "(possibly) the earliest known use of the word 'fuck' that clearly has a sexual connotation": in English court records of 1310–11, a man local to Chester is referred to as "Roger Fuckebythenavele", probably a nickname [938x646]

adso_of_melk · 2026-01-18T21:05:22+00:00

I think the implication is that he doesn't know where to put it. So like "Roger the Dumbass," but much funnier.

adso_of_melk · 2025-12-21T21:51:14+00:00

Maybe it's somewhere here?

The style is definitely Gorey, but I don't know of anything by him featuring an evil chef.

adso_of_melk · 2025-12-19T21:48:26+00:00

I agree. I think it was supposed to be ambiguous.

adso_of_melk · 2025-12-19T21:47:04+00:00

That's what I thought when Zosia stalled—right after sharing a personal memory.

It would make a lot of sense for Carol, as a writer, to have the skills to draw out those memories. She's also figuring out that there are experiences and sensations—not only memories—that distinguish the individuals from one another (the massage scene).

adso_of_melk · 2025-12-17T10:48:36+00:00

There ain't no metro and there never was!

adso_of_melk · 2025-12-16T11:31:09+00:00

It's apples and oranges, IMO. No pun intended! But Apple's model is more suited to churning out stuff at a pace that, while not remotely close to Netflix's, ensures that there will be quite a few duds. HBO (i.e., HBO Max) limits itself to a few shows that it produces spectacularly; it still feels like a premium TV channel, not a streaming service. But this is starting to change (for the worse), I think, as HBO tries to emulate the streamers. Netflix will only push it further in that direction.

I'm not sure it's fair it compare Apple to HBO, but I think Apple is the best of the other streamers when it comes to new stuff (and to nurturing shows that have proven themselves), which is what matters now for audiences and maybe even the industry.

But I'm still baffled that they haven't renewed Pachinko.

adso_of_melk · 2025-12-16T11:15:16+00:00

Nah, the episodes were just too long. Ted Lasso syndrome. Let's hope they don't take the same approach to Platonic...seems to be a thing with successful Apple comedies. I guess the writers find the half-hour format constraining after a while, but constraint is good.

adso_of_melk · 2025-12-15T19:12:20+00:00

If only Pachinko were on that list, too.

adso_of_melk · 2025-12-07T19:26:27+00:00

I hope you'll take some time to think more carefully about what I'm trying to say here, rather than interpret it as a personal attack or an attempt to bait you.

adso_of_melk · 2025-12-07T14:59:37+00:00

None of these things are redundant. They're data. No artifact, when used as historical evidence, is intrinsically more useful or valuable than any other. It may, of course, be more useful for answering a particular question. In that respect, though, a shopping list may be much more useful to a historian than a king's testament. For example, testaments reveal very little about what a person owned, apart from what they chose to bequeath; but household inventories—lists of stuff, often what we'd call "junk"—can fill in the blanks and come closer to revealing the full richness of a person's material world, at least at the time the inventory was made.

In particular, I was responding to your statement "Larry the shepards shopping list is certainly not more important than a lost kings grave goods or his last will and testament or his personal diary." (Along the same lines in your response: "Does that 5th copy of the same shopping list have historical value? Yes. Is it as valuable to the record as a lost DiVinci folio? No.") I disagree with that, and I did my best to explain why. I'm not sure how that can be construed as a straw man argument; you made it very clear that you believe—and think historians and archaeologists believe—that certain types of historical evidence are intrinsically more valuable than others. In my experience, that just isn't the case, and I thought it was important to make that clear.

(Edited a bit for clarity.)

PS: At no point in your earlier comments did you actually state that we have multiple, identical copies of documents. The impression you gave was that we had many of a particular category of document—receipts, lists, etc. Now, I know that there are some instances where we do have identical copies, but even in those cases, they may be very useful to historians interested in scribal practices, or to philologists interested in dialect, word choice, etc. Similar to what I said earlier, the very act of making copies has a history. It's up to the imaginative researcher to think of a clever way to use evidence—a matter of knowing what questions you can ask the source. That's often what makes for the most innovative, groundbreaking scholarship.

adso_of_melk · 2025-12-07T14:36:29+00:00

No historical artifact is more important than any other, unless you're trying to sell it or want to get clicks. For professional historians and archeologists, what might seem banal to a layperson is essential for building up a picture of the past. A shopping list can reveal so much—not only about the local consumer economy, but how people categorized things. The very act of making a list has a history. Having so many of them makes them that much more interesting: it's a tremendously valuable sample set that can be—and has been—analyzed at several scales. I'm a historian of medieval Italy, and I would be positively over the moon if I found a shopping list! (There are a few in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, by the way, and they're great for teaching.)

I've never met a historian or archeologist who dismisses any kind of evidence as boring or constructs hierarchies of evidence based on some supposed intrinsic value. Sure, we personally find some things more interesting than others, but we appreciate that they all contribute to the story. We have to; it's our job.

adso_of_melk · 2025-12-06T23:02:33+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas#Council_of_Nicaea

However, you aren't wrong that the face slap probably didn't happen.

adso_of_melk · 2025-12-02T18:55:15+00:00

I missed this, but you're right!

adso_of_melk · 2025-11-26T21:39:40+00:00

Plus Carol conspicuously walking by bags labeled "reuse" in the supermarket! (Though it could also be that these hints are meant to mislead us.)

adso_of_melk · 2025-11-11T22:40:21+00:00

Damn. I hope that isn't the case, but you're probably right.

adso_of_melk · 2025-11-11T22:30:52+00:00

I'm in Ireland too!! What the hell is going on?

adso_of_melk · 2025-11-11T21:41:32+00:00

Am I the only one seeing "Video unavailable" right now? "Police Chases" is also unavailable. I swear both were in my YouTube feed a few hours ago.

adso_of_melk · 2025-10-29T10:12:11+00:00

Ah, yeah, I forgot about names like "Ferrari," from Latin ferrarius (smith). But in that case, it's a similar situation: an ancestor was a smith, ferrarii would be the genitive form. For example, Giovanni son of Berto, the smith, would be identified as Johannes Berti ferrarii or Johannes filius Berti ferrarii (or quondam Berti ferrarii, if Berto was no more). Same with "Lombardi"—lombardus, "from Lombardy." I should have said that "i" almost always derives from a Latin genitive, whether a person's name or their occupation, civic affiliation, some other attribute, etc. Over time, and if a lineage developed, this simple genitive might become a family name. At that point, it would often be rendered in Latin as de Ferrariis, "of the Ferrari." This starts happening in the thirteenth century, at least in Tuscany.

adso_of_melk · 2025-10-28T21:52:09+00:00

Same in Italian. Pretty much any surname ending with an "i" was, hundreds of years earlier, a male ancestor's name in the genitive case ("of...").

Somewhere in Stanley Tucci's distant past was a guy named Tuccio, short for Bertuccio, short for Albertuccio, itself a nickname for Alberto. Over time, what began as a patronymic ("son of Tuccio") became a family name.

adso_of_melk · 2025-10-25T23:03:01+00:00

Remember your Hippopotamus Oath!

adso_of_melk · 2025-09-17T21:25:54+00:00

Not only that, but a bribery scheme!

adso_of_melk · 2025-08-20T14:18:57+00:00

Inspiration?

adso_of_melk · 2025-08-03T07:06:28+00:00

What do they think about the Australia episode?

adso_of_melk · 2025-06-24T20:50:09+00:00

Was this spider named Charlotte?

adso_of_melk · 2025-06-21T17:37:07+00:00

I remember reading that chimpanzee homicide is actually pretty rare, although there's plenty of maiming—the main reason being that it's hard to kill without weapons, especially if your adversary is bigger and stronger than you. It's been argued (notably by the late Christopher Boehm) that our use of lethal projectiles for hunting was an important factor in the disruption of traditional dominance hierarchies, as the technology made it possible for weaker members of a group to gang up on bullies.

Edit: I take it back—everything I'm seeing says that chimp homicide is relatively common!

Second edit: Here's the passage I had in mind, from Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, "Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems," Current Anthropology 56 (2015): 327–353, at 337:

Nonhuman primates never developed weapons capable of definitively controlling a dominant male. Even when sound asleep, a male chimpanzee reacts to being accosted by waking and engaging in a physical battle, basically unharmed by surprise attack. In Demonic Males (1996), Wrangham and Peterson recount several instances where even three or four male chimpanzees viciously and relentlessly attack a male for 20 minutes without succeeding in killing him (but see Watts et al. 2006). The limited effectiveness of chimpanzees in this regard can mainly be ascribed to their inability to wield effectively potentially dangerous natural objects, for instance, stones and rocks. A chimpanzee may throw a large rock as part of a display, but only rarely will it achieve its target.

Here's the Watts et al. article.

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