You can call me nobody

fuck twitter

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and fuck you

Reading the 1812 version of Grimm's fairy tales and this is the most unsettling story I've encountered so far. The idea behind the ending, I think, is that a young child would choose the apple and an older child or an adult would choose the coin, which is obviously of more value. The boy's choice of the apple shows that he doesn't have the maturity or knowledge to understand the weight of what he has done, and so he can't be punished for it.

Also, the apple in this context obviously carries connotations of original sin. The boy in choosing it shows his innocence and his complete lack of knowledge of good and evil, it is sort of an inversion of the Adam and Eve story. But the boy's innocence doesn't make him gentle or good. It's more like the innocence of an animal.

On one hand, you can interpret it as - because of original sin, humanity at its most natural and innocent tends towards horrible acts. It's only with knowledge and maturity that we can be good. Hence the "wise old man." You have the child too young to have any moral understanding, the adults who are filled with moral uncertainty, and the experienced old man, who is the only one who knows what they should do.

At the same time there's something moving about the terrible innocence of the boy, who "grabbed the apple with a laugh." His innocence means he can't really be accused of malice or evil. He doesn't display them, he doesn't even know what they are. You have the adults struggling to know what the moral response to the situation is, but the boy is utterly untroubled and unburdened by any of this.

Elements of Architecture

M.J. Gradl（German, 1873-1934）

The Soul of a Souless City -New York 1920

Christopher Nevinson (1889-1976)

All right, let’s address the tit situation. You’ve left me no choice.

In bird names like blue tit, great tit and coal tit, the word tit traces back to an old Middle English name titmouse, which simply meant a small bird. In Middle English it appeared as titmose or titmase, where tit was a word for something small, and the second element came from Old English māse, an old name for these little birds. Over time speakers confused mose/mase with the more familiar English word mouse, even though these birds aren’t rodents at all, and eventually dropped the second part altogether, leaving just tit in the bird names. This shortening still survives in British usage, while in North America titmouse (or chickadee) is still used for many members of this family.

The Old English māse is part of a broader Germanic family of words for these lively songbirds: it survives today in German Meise, Dutch mees and Swedish mes for the same kinds of small birds. The related French mésange ultimately comes from the same cluster of medieval names.

As for the completely unrelated modern English slang word, tit is connected to Old English tit(t), Middle Low German and Dutch titte, and German Zitze, and probably began as a nursery term, perhaps echoing the sound made while suckling. Meanwhile, Swedish mes has taken on a figurative sense of a timid or weak person, which is extremely unfair to the actual birds, many of which are bold, acrobatic and surprisingly feisty at the garden feeder.