i cant even cringe what the fuck is this
i cant even cringe what the fuck is this
Funny and bizarre German animal namesThe German language is famous for some really long nouns (Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän comes to mind). This is because German nouns, verbs, prepositions and adjectives are like lego bricks; you can stick them together in almost any way to create new words that encapsulate new concepts. This gives the language a special ability to name just about anything. You could call it the German language’s lego brick-like quality, or Legosteineigenschaft (see what I just did there?).
But why does German rely on such an elaborate process to name things as simple as squirrels? When broken down into their separate components, the names of familiar animals mutate into bizarre new creatures.
The Uncanny X-Tiere
Comics are full of heroes with names like super, wonder, iron, ultra, bat or cat followed by -man, -woman, -girl or -boy. A lot of German animal names work the same way, where Tier – the word for animal – is preceded by a word describing that animal’s “super power”.
Stinktier – stink animal (skunk)
Faultier – lazy animal (sloth)
Gürteltier – belt animal (armadillo)
Murmeltier – mumbling animal (groundhog)
Schnabeltier – beak animal (platypus)
Maultier – mouth animal (mule)
Trampeltier – trampling animal (bactrian camel). The verb trampeln means to trample or tread upon, whereas the noun Trampel is a clumsy oaf.
Sometimes suffixes get more specific than -tier, but still tend to describe the wrong animal:
Schildkröte – shield toad (tortoise)
Waschbär – wash bear (raccoon)
Nacktschnecke – naked snail (slug)
Fledermaus – flutter mouse (bat)
Seehund – sea dog (seal)
Tintenfisch – ink fish (squid)
Truthahn – threatening chicken (turkey). Trut is onomatopoeic for the trut-trut-trut cluck of a turkey, but it’s also been hypothesized that the name comes from the Middle German droten which means “to threaten”.
No, I’m Pretty Sure That’s A Pig
Swine seem to be a popular yardstick in German animal taxonomy.
Schweinswal – pig whale (porpoise)
Seeschwein – sea pig (dugong). Not to be confused with the Seekuh, or sea cow, known in English as a manatee.
Stachelschwein – spike pig (porcupine). The English word is actually just as literal; porcupine sounds a lot like “pork spine”.
Wasserschwein – water pig (capybara)
Meerschweinchen – ocean piglet (guinea pig). The ending -chen denotes something small. Add it to the end of Schwein and you get a little pig, or piglet. Since the stems Meer and Wasser are often interchangeable, it’s most likely that Meerschweinchen actually means little capybara.
Just Plain Weird
I’d like to end this list by giving one animal a category all to itself: the humble squirrel.
- little oak horn: Eiche (oak tree) + Horn (horn) + -chen (little)
- oak croissant: Eiche (oak tree) + Hörnchen (croissant)
- Eichkätzchen (regional name) and Eichkatzerl (Austria) – oak kitten
Calling a squirrel a “tree kitten” is reasonably literal, but where does “little oak horn” come from? It seems that the answer comes down to a misplaced h: Eichhörnchen comes from the Old and Middle German eichorn, which has nothing to do with oak trees or horns. In this case, the eich comes from the ancient Indo-Germanic word aig, which means agitated movement, combined with the now obsolete suffix -orn. Somewhere in history a superfluous h was added (along with the diminutive -chen ending) but the original meaning remained. Today, Hörnchen is a category of rodents that includes all squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, prairie dogs and flying squirrels.
Keep an eye on this spot for an upcoming post where we’ll delve deeper into the animal kingdom: branching out to birds, insects, reptiles, fishes and any other mammals we find crawling around.
this is real
GOLLY FUCKING GOSH WHAT A NICE DAY FOR SURFING!
Higher quality @ Gfycat.com
Turn-around commission for someone over on FA !
I really like drawing wild dog-like spots ‘n speckles ; v;/
the proposal of “queer characters in fiction that aren’t defined by their sexuality” appears outwardly harmless or even good but is to me codified and toxic in some way I can’t articulate right now… help?
"aren’t defined by their sexuality" is an incredibly different standard when applied to heterosexuality than when applied to homosexuality (and furthermore, entirely different when applied to heterosexual men then to heterosexual women, but that’s another articulation)
to use a fairly explicit genre example, heterosexual male action heroes frequently have heterosexual plotlines, motivations, sex scenes, lines, their behavior and actions and interactions and character history is built not only from all the other components, but from their heterosexuality. for some reason my first example is always demolition man, where Stallone has an entire, uncomfortably lengthy scene about Real Straight Fucking and not this namby-pampy future sex with wires and condoms
for gay men to not be defined by their sexuality is to usually be essentially asexual, maybe in a relationship but it has to be coded off-screen, included in throwaway lines (the “my boyfriend will love this!” bit from Paranorman being constantly praised as a GREAT EXAMPLE when tbqh I found it to be pandering horseshit), but definitely not too sexual, definitely not too “gay” in a way that visibly marks them as so (nevermind that heterosexuality for men is so linked to virility and machismo and ‘natural’ maleness and yet this behavior is never treat as “shoving their heterosexuality in your face”)
Did anybody ever claim that Superbad suffered from making characters who were defined by their sexuality, even though the entire film is about teen male heterosexuality?
Straight men (and to a lesser extent, straight women) get to be as visibly straight as they want to be in as many ways as they want to be but in order for queer characters to not be “defined by their sexuality” they usually have to completely fucking forsake any mention of it that might make audiences uncomfortable for longer than three seconds of screentime.