the Bible is a historical document, just not in the way 95% of people think it is when historians say that. people not understanding this concept is why you can’t adequately discuss anything concerning said source with them because they kneejerk into “IT’S ALL FAIRYTALES AND LIES!!!” or “everything happened exactly like that and there’s no debate”. in both cases a regrettable lack of nuance, but worse so in the former case because often those people pretend to be in the camp of “rational science”. something something please develop some historical literacy before you engage in discussions pertaining to (ancient) history.
According to Genesis 38 while walking back home with his goats Judah mistook his daughter in law for a temple prostitute and gave her an IOU because he didn’t have any cash on hand. This means nothing to either of the extremist camps but it tells a student of archeology that there were temple prostitutes in the SWANA region thousands of years ago and that they took IOUs from shepherds.
Googled “how to pull out your own tooth” and all the top responses are like “here’s why you shouldn’t pull out your own tooth” and that’s simply not what I asked
this is because of all these dental offices hiring people to write SEO articles that bump to the top of google, in 2003 I could have googled this and gotten to a neon blue geocities called Jim’s Teeth DYI written in comic sans by one guy on his lunch break and when I went to go click on the blog post “best pliers for getting those suckers out” my mouse would have left sparkles in its wake
My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word “the” used in phrases like: “the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or "the bigger they come, the harder they fall”. This “the” is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English “þā”, pronounced “tha” which means either “when” or “then”. Back in early Middle English the structure “if - then” had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said “þā whatever, þā whatever”, meaning “when such-and- such, then such-and-such”. “þā” sounds almost the same as “the” and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. “the more, the merrier” literally means “when more, then merrier” or “if more, then merrier’; same as centuries ago.
end ID]
this is so cool
Yep! That etymology is cognate with Swedish ty and dylik, Norwegian di, fordi, and difor, German desto, Dutch des te, etc. A lot of Germanic languages preserve that root word as its own separate thing, in English it just got turned into a homonym through sound changes and conflation.
pls reblog with the correction lol this has been bothering me
[image description: tweets from user Matt (official) that read, "this is not quite accurate. this ‘the’ comes from þȳ, the old instrumental case of the definite article. so it’s like 'whereby x, therefore y’ or 'by how much x, that’s how much y.’
þā … þā does indeed mean 'when … then’ in Old English, but this temporal correlative is not where we get 'the more the merrier’ construction. i’m afraid someone took an OE class and mixed a few things up.
so it doesn’t originally mean 'if more, then merrier’ as suggested in the comment. it has always meant 'by how much more, that’s how much merrier’ i.e. double or triple the quantity leads to double or triple the merriment.” end id.]
