wow I love yellow and minecraft

[ID: A photo of a small white cat with orange spots, sitting on a scale at the vet. She has wide eyes and is looking around with mild suspicion. I’m holding her for her comfort, with only my arms in frame. End ID.]

This is Caper.

She’s a sweet, goofy cat who we recently learned was abandoned by the previous owner of our home. She's adorable and getting along well with our other cats, but she also came to us very injured and needs surgery. Even just sharing the word helps a lot!

The link below takes you to our go fund me page, Caper says thanks for reading!

going to the doctor? at least a copay that could be reduced by insurance but never fully gone if not an entire multi-hundred dollar bill for them to say eh idk and maybe run tests that also cost money. oh, and you’ll probably pay double for a specialist that you wait months for a five minute appointment

get prescription medications to manage symptoms from said doctor? again, might get reduced by insurance but could be in the thousands per month. but hey! they want me to hold on to hope of meeting my deductible

can’t get prescriptions? that’s money spent on OTC pain meds and allergy meds and GI meds and supplements and mobility aids and so on

need a special diet? gonna cost you an arm and a leg to keep it up because the generic brands aren’t going to stock them/won’t have them without other ingredients that trigger symptoms

and you know actually? groceries in general costs doubled from when i moved out last year so a weeks worth of food has been upwards of $200 even with generic brands and cutting corners

too symptomatic to cook and no one to help?delivery costs add up rapidly and you’ll be judged by everyone for not eating healthy and feeding the corporate system

add on the rent, utilities, car bills, student costs if you’re in school, time spent at work and school that makes you feel worse, and maybe getting a small treat once and a while because you fucking deserve one coffee once in a while and you’re fucked!

and then getting official government disability benefits takes forever and probably needs to be challenged by a lawyer if initially denied (court costs) and even then it barely covers everything and you can’t save any money without getting the benefits taken away!

If I understand correctly, medieval French folk tales considered chestnut-colored horses to be deceitful and tricky; the Old French word for a chestnut or dun horse was fauvel, and so the Old French expression correier fauvel, literally "to brush the chestnut horse", meant lying or being hypocritical for personal gain. This turned into "curry favel" in 15th-century English, and then mutated into "curry favor" over the next few centuries as people forgot about the horse.

So "currying favor" is really "brushing the Horse of Lies", and the reason you can't curry goodwill, or love, or hatred, or even disfavor is that we didn't have Horses for those.

I realize, looking back on this post, that regular readers of my blog may have thought I made this up. Making up a ridiculous etymology is certainly the sort of thing I might do; in fact I've been meaning to start a sideblog dedicated solely to sufficiently accurate etymologies, and have a notebook with dozens of them jotted down, I just haven't had the time to do anything with them.

But I want to stress that this is not one of those cases. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the very real etymology of the phrase "curry favor".

The Old French fauve or falve referred to the light-brown color that's sometimes called "fallow" in modern English, but since it also sounded similar to faux, meaning "false", it was also associated with deceit and trickery ; the idiom estriller Fauvel literally meant "to groom the fallow one" but idiomatically meant "to lie or trick people".

Then in the 1300s we get the French poem Roman de Fauvel, a satirical poem about a fauve horse, whose name is derived both from the color and from the fact that FAVVEL is an acronym of Flaterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Varieté, Envie, Lascheté (Flattery, Greed, Vileness, Fickleness, Envy, and Cowardice) - all the different vices that this horse embodies.

Fauvel (purportedly modeled after Enguerrand de Marigny [source], an advisor to King Philip IV) is a sinful, conniving, and very rich horse who has various religious and secular leaders fawning over him and brushing him; it was well-known enough that "grooming Fauvel" came to mean "sucking up to someone powerful" more than just "being evil", and when it was translated into English the grooming was translated as currying, which specifically is grooming a horse with a curry comb [wiktionary]. From this we got the Middle English expression "currying Fauvel", which then mutated via folk etymology (in the "reinterpretation of unfamiliar words as more familiar ones" sense, not the "people are wrong about etymology" sense) into "currying favor".

Curry favor in:

Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curry_favor

Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/curry%20favor

printer 1: lets crumple up paper and jam on it and make a ton of noise

printer 2: yay

printer 3: yay

So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said "Death Star".