We just need to accept that eventually all of our technology will be made out of living creatures and the majority of astronaut training is going to be how not to accidentally get digested by your space suit.
This also reminds a great deal of Cordwainer Smith's SF writing except iirc he posited it would be shellfish used as radiation shielding, but still. Close. Especially as he died in 1966.
Ancient Egyptians were pretty straightforward. Didn't they call cats "meow" (spelled differently but i cant remember how) because thats the sound cats make? Love it haha.
To be fair, that follows a lot of naming conventions worldwide. I think even 'cat' the English word was from one based on the chattering noise they make when frustrated XD
'Mau', I believe. That's certainly the modern name of the primordial Egyptian breed. Egyptian Mau - Wikipedia There are several theories. It seems to be derived from the Latin 'cattus', itself a loan word meaning, well, cat. (Despite the existence of 'felis', it seems they felt a second word was necessary) Exactly what language 'cattus' is a loan from is unclear, with two primary theories being that is derived from a Semitic language such as Arabic 'قَطّ/qaṭṭ' , or another Afro-Asiatic language such as Nubian 'kadis' The origin of that I don't know, but the Hebrew equivalent 'חתול/chatool' means swaddling cloth or wrapping. There's another theory that's its derived from the Uralic word for 'stoat/mustelid' by way of 'käďwä', meaning 'furred animal'
Kitty (and kitten) is also very clearly derived from the Arabic 'qitt', which the feminine of the above mentioned 'qatt', so it's possible two of our words for cat are just different sexes of the same root word. :P
Yet another reason I shouldn't have a pet fox; apparently they pee when happy, and fox urine really, really, really stinks. Shame, they're about the prettiest animals ever.
My parents for years threatened not to do anything for any holidays in winter for above reasons, saying it was blasphemy, but never actually gave such an in depth analysis! That's neat. Personally i just do holiday stuff because i like giving people things and eating crazy food, so the religious connotations themselves never really interested me until i was older
Excavators in Pompeii recently uncovered the 2000 year old equivocation of a roman food stall! Its almost completely intact and even has preserved art
This is so fucking cool!! I went to Pompeii once, when I was fifteen, but that was over a decade ago--it's so neat that they're still discovering stuff there!!
Oh, yeah. At least 50% of Pompeii hasn't been excavated and there are no plans to do so until the technology's advanced enough that they can preserve it properly once it's excavated. There's a lot of sites like that in China, too, where they know there's something historically super important buried at a specific site...and it's not going to get dug up until they're sure they can do it properly and keep it preserved right for future generations. (The tomb the Terracotta Army came from, primarily. Although that's also not getting excavated until there's some significant tech advances, because the next section they'd be looking at digging up has some quite worrying quantities of mercury in the soil...and, uh, the emperor whose tomb it is was supposed to have had a whole 3D map of China laid out in one of the chambers, complete with liquid mercury to simulate the rivers. The good news about the mercury in the soil is, it means the odds of the map actually being real are better than one might have expected. But it's still a serious hazard to contend with.)
On the one hand, this is an extremely useful word and I'm glad I now know it! On the other hand, all I can think of when I see "dory" in ANYTHING is the Ellen DeGeneres fish from Finding Nemo.
