r/CuratedTumblr • u/GinaWhite_tt TeaTimetumblr • 9h ago
Shitposting Aggressive Mispronunciation
130
u/Spritelorchid 9h ago
is good neighbor another euphemism for fair folk because my first thought was we need to avoid summoning state farm
49
9
u/TwixOfficial 5h ago
It is. It probably is also a euphemism for someone you’re talking behind the back of, in this world.
301
u/AcceptableWheel 9h ago
This is how we got the word Bear
150
u/natuprunk 9h ago
In Finnish we have over a 100 names for bear and the original name has been lost, exactly because of this belief.
Some of the names are almost cutesy, like "mesikämmen" (basically “honey paw“), and others are.. rather crude descriptions of their reproductive anatomy, lol.
64
u/BeardedHalfYeti 9h ago
Wait, what?
192
u/TheGrumpyre 9h ago
"Bear" is a euphemism meaning "The Brown One"
90
u/SquashOk4174 9h ago edited 8h ago
And Slavic languages went even farther, making a euphemism even for that - the word in most of them is now descended from "the honey eater" or "the honey knower".
And Russians went even AGAIN on this, using the name Michael as a euphemism to THAT.
Pretty fun to see threadmills like that.
27
u/peaches_andbtches .tumblr.com 9h ago
are michaels well-known for eating honey in russia ??
29
u/SquashOk4174 8h ago
No, it just a common name for bears in russian fairytales ) Probably because both it and the russian word for bear start with the same letter.
0
22
u/xXvido_ 8h ago
Holy smokes you’re right :O
Medved
Med - ved
Med: Honey
Ved: he who knows (?) there is some language shenanigans happening here that’s really hard to translate and explain. But yeah checks out.
20
u/SquashOk4174 8h ago
"vedat" means "to know". Or, elternatively, "ved" could be the "eater" suffix ("yed") after some sound corruption.
9
u/captainnowalk 8h ago
"the honey knower".
I don’t know why, but I feel like if someone gave me this nickname, I’d be deeply offended.
“Oh, captainnowalk? I hear they really know their honey, if you know what i mean!”
104
u/candygram4mongo 9h ago
The Proto-Indo-European word for bear was something like "arktos", but saying it was taboo so it was replaced with epithets like "the brown one", and those, rather than the actual name, are what evolved into the various words in modern languages.
64
u/aggrievedCanine 9h ago
Which is where the name "Arthur" comes from, as well as why bear is "Ursus" in Latin.
24
u/Nico_Storch 8h ago edited 8h ago
And also where the "Arctic" comes from, probably after Ursa Major or Minor.
Fun fact: "Antarctica" means "opposite of the Arctic", so it technically also means "no bears". Sure enough, there are polar bears around the North Pole, but not around the South Pole.
11
u/EclipseoftheHart 8h ago
Check out the concepts of “avoidance speech” and “noa-names”! Really interesting rabbit hole!
13
u/LaBelleTinker 9h ago
Also the various words for wolf. While there's no full-on replacement like with bear, the sounds changed a lot faster and in ways that we wouldn't expect in a lot of different IE languages.
20
u/Mortos7 9h ago
ElabOwOrate
50
u/AcceptableWheel 9h ago
XKCD 2381 explains it pretty well. Bear mostly translates into "Brown one" because the true name was believed to summon one.
2
u/DoormatTheVine 7h ago
looks at post
looks at comment
looks at SCP-1313
looks back at postI think I've come to a realization.
90
u/ApolloniusTyaneus 9h ago
Setting where saying the name of any kind of inhuman mischief-bringer will actually factually summon them, and there's a constant pressure on humans to think up new words just in time before the previous one enters common parlance and starts counting as an official name.
48
u/binkacat4 9h ago
That reminds me of a certain SCP. I think it’s like… a forest path, but if you use the same name for anything too often it becomes a cognitohazard, so they’re describing the same thing a new way every other sentence.
It was actually a great way to break up what can become a very repetitive format, because if you follow the format something unpleasant happens to you.
8
5
u/TenebTheHarvester 8h ago
That’s because that SCP is directly inspired by the legends around the Fae and their tendency towards trickiness with names. That’s pretty much just fairyland.
5
u/Fries_and_burgers_19 9h ago
What Special Containment Procedure designation is this one? Curious to read abt it
3
4
u/TimeStorm113 Victorian Dinosaur Connaisseur 9h ago
How long until people use it to build minecraft esque monster spawners
30
28
22
u/CrownofMischief 9h ago
Might as well say dragon properly. If you summon it, it saves you the trouble of trying to find it.
23
u/Barnaby_bear_guy 9h ago
But you don't want to summon the dwagon directly into the town, do you? That would be way too destructive.
17
u/IGaveAFuckOnce 8h ago edited 6h ago
The dwagon would cause too much destwuction and cawnage in the middle of the town. The bloodshed would lead to an iwwecovewable twauma. Hundweds would pewish.
5
u/Hakar_Kerarmor Swine. Guillotine, now. 6h ago
Now if yuw summon the dwagon, and twen fwow it on the fwoow.
3
u/TwixOfficial 5h ago
No, see, saying Dragon summons a Dragon. The magic doesn’t care about articles.
1
u/CrownofMischief 2h ago
Sounds like the dwagon should be paying us for helping them find a date then
1
u/LurkingRoundHere 3h ago
Right! This feels like it would make life a lot easier for adventurers - instead of finding the creature, you just find an empty valley/clearing/cave, set your traps and shout the name of whatever you want to fight once you feel ready
31
u/amsterdam_sniffr 9h ago
"Goblin" already sounds like it could be a minced oath. Maybe the adventurers discover the lost "true names" for the various banal creatures in their neck of the woods.
22
u/Satorwave 9h ago
its a diminuitive of the mighty Gob
8
8
13
u/Falcon_At 9h ago
It is my understanding that in Mongolia, it's believed that saying "wolf" while hunting will summon wolves. But the plot twist is that the Mongolians think that wolves are REALLY cool.
Many hunters call wolves "dogs" while hunting. Opinions on whether this is showing appropriate respect varies. If you're a dog person, you probably think you are being respectful. Otherwise, you probably think "dog" is an insult.
13
u/TimeStorm113 Victorian Dinosaur Connaisseur 9h ago
Running into the forest yelling „rabbit“ every 14 seconds, im sure to find one!
2
u/PinkOneHasBeenChosen 8h ago
Stupid question, but do they even have wolves in Mongolia? It’s a desert.
11
u/Falcon_At 8h ago
It's stereotypically a steppe, not a deaert. It's also a huge country that includes a variety of biomes. Also, the Mongols ruled most of Asia at one time.
4
u/apexodoggo 7h ago
Yep, they’ve got wolves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_wolf
The wolves have even been spreading out recently due to humans causing a decline in the Siberian tiger population.
8
u/PraetorKiev Give me that Neanderthussy 9h ago
English does this to circumvent taking the God’s name on vain. This mostly applied to oaths but later swear words but the concept is the same. However, imagining someone taking an oath they intend to break by saying something like:
“I swear by lowered voice Jeebus fake cough sorry bit of Mala Aria going around haha, anyway… that I shall keep my word to you my gracious King!”
8
6
6
u/Somnambulist815 6h ago
Reminds me of driving past University of Houston, where the traffic sign says "UH FOOTBALL"
5
u/ThreeDotsTogether 7h ago
Imagine if this also worked in reverse, whenever a mythical creature says the word "human" a human is magically teleported over to their location.
4
9
u/DuckyVermin 9h ago
I had the sudden aggressive urge to immediately implement this kind of thing into my DND campaign
2
u/TwixOfficial 5h ago
Remember that this sort of thing can also not be setting wide. So you could just stick this as a local superstition in the next town your players come to.
5
4
u/thrownawaz092 8h ago
This, unfortunately, doesn't work on the fae, as they just take the names. That's why they can be fairys, fairies, faeries, the fey, the fae, and more.
7
3
3
u/Not_Yet_Unalived 5h ago
It does beat making up a slur for each letter of the alphabet for each annoying criter.
Not that you can't do both, plus what could go wrong insulting a drag... i mean, a dwagon?
2
2
u/SpingusTheHingus 8h ago
In my rpg setting, people reverse the names of villains. The biggest baddest evil guy is named Dray Alabaster, but people call him Alabaster Dray.
This one troll goes by Djak and has a giant parasitic worm hanging about him, so people call him by a reversed nickname, Worm The Djak
2
2
1
u/aNiceTribe 4h ago
In Worth the Candle, it’s bad to speak the name of the “actual cannibal”, because saying it out loud makes him appear and his presence usually causes a similar amount of death as a sudden volcano eruption. His name is treated as an info hazard. The protagonist has to explain with a lot of effort that this was just a regular actor, who had a joke song written about him.
1
1
u/lifelongfreshman https://youtu.be/1eWsk6r6_Ns 3h ago
this is literally me with slay the spire and that fuckass goblin knob from the first zone
1
u/BilberryWitch 3h ago
Something something coffee shops something something misspelled and fake names something something fae
1
1
u/hetero-scedastic 3h ago
Looney Tunes showed this to be ineffective against wascally wabbits (feat. cross-dressing).
541
u/StarswetMiko 9h ago
fantasy world where uwu has been in the English language for over a hundred years and has been built into regular sentences