Hi! [insert witty clever thing here]

I like to imagine the lives of the ancients as every bit as vibrant and witty as ours today; they simply lacked our modern conveniences and lived at a slower pace, with knowledge rooted in religion and mythology rather than modern science.

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

He was wrongfully raided by police in 2022

He used footage and names of the specific cops in posts, videos and songs making fun of them

The cops sued for defamation and cried in court about the songs ruining their lives

I'm the OP. I'm making this post. If you like, comment, reblog (without comment) on this post, then I'm the one who will see all those notes in my activity page.

However...

If you reblog (with comment), I will get a notification that you did that, but any likes/comments/reblogs (without comment) you get on that reblog will only be shown to you. As OP I won't see them.

If someone adds a reblog (with comment) to your reblog...as OP I won't see that. I won't see any of those notes in my activity page.

Basically, if someone with a large following makes a comment, then they will get all the notes and OP will see nothing. If OP has said something silly because they're, y'know, 21 and it happens, and then someone reblogs it onto the dash of someone with a large following who then dunks on them for fun? OP doesn't see it, doesn't get notes for it, but they're gonna get the harrassment for it in their inbox.

If I, someone with a 5 digit follower count, reblog something to correct misinformation on Ancient Egypt, then OP will never see it unless it was on the original post, but I will continue to get notes on that post even though it's not my post. If I reblog fanart, or just art in general, with a comment like 'Oh this is so lovely!' then OP will not see any of the notes from people reblogging it from me. They'll only see my reblog. So it's possible for an art post by someone else to have 200 notes for them, but 9000 for someone who reblogs it with a comment, and the OP artist will have no idea it's been seen by that many people.

It's killing blow to the community we've built here, by someone higher up who doesn't understand that being able to see all the comments and reblogs is what makes this site the place I keep coming back to.

That's what sucks.

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. 

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English". 

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. 

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. 

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. 

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. 

By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". 

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. 

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. 

Pros:

Cleaner, easier to navigate interface

Free servers for more permanent group chat things (way easier to hop in and out of chats)

You can actually have different nicknames on each server if you want

Is actually well built and doesn’t make your computer yearn for death

Stuff coming down the pipeline soon according to devs:

Video chat

Linux client

Cons:

All your friends aren’t on it

But you can change that

friends lists

group chats

changeable statuses

search function