Amin khiluva lle a' gurtha ar' thar

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

More Than This Provincial Wife

by ApprenticedMagician

T, 5k, Wangxian

Summary: "It might not be so terrible, you and I. It’s not like I want a miserable marriage. I’d make you happy, if you told me how.” Lan Wangji weighed his offer, golden gaze assessing for a long time, until he bowed his head low and very politely said, “Thank you, Wei Wuxian, but I doubt I can ever return the favour.” // The negotiations surrounding the Lan and Jiang's marriage alliance encountered a few snags in the beginning. Kay's comments: Very cool merpeople AU where Wangxian are arranged to get married! The Untamed characterization of Wangxian, but Mama Lan is around and looking out for her son, who still struggles to communicate his intentions clearly, but he gets there eventually! Really loved the world-building in this. Excerpt: He hadn’t thought the Arctic’s surface would be any different from home, but upon breaching his senses were battered under a ruthless assault. The air was much colder and the north wind sharp, freezing the water between his gills and piercing down his entire throat until he choked on nothing but winter. It was unseasonably bright thanks to the icebergs and snowbanks that reflected the setting sun, hurting his light-sensitive eyes no matter where he turned. And it was noisy this side of the surface – not just from waves, but from screeching birds that circled above him and a pack of land animals that lurked nearby, barking to each other over some commotion on the shore, which made Wei Wuxian dart away in fright, despite his unseeing eyes. Startled and panicked, he ran blindly into several rocks, which bruised his skin and jolted him off his intended course to return to Gusu. Eventually he regained enough wit to dive back beneath the surface, down and down and down, further down until the depths returned him to a quiet dark, where he could breathe, calm down, and rub his burning eyes in peace. Or so he thought. “Breaching the surface at daylight is forbidden,” said a deep voice, startling Wei Wuxian into a yelp and a flail that tripped him back into a body bigger and taller than his own, with a firm and solid core despite the layer of blubber that padded it warm.

pov wei wuxian, alternate universe, merpeople, merperson wei wuxian, merperson lan wangji, arranged marriage, mutual pining, first meetings, getting to know each other, misunderstandings, angst with a happy ending, strangers to lovers, madam lan lives

~*~

Couple of Thieves

I really like the colours you get on magpies, what at first glance looks like a other black and white bird is actually full of these wonderfully iridescent greens and purples