8 ms·
Men Becoming Wolves
- sgarrity 6y agoI just stopped by for the Werewolf Bar Mitzvah reference... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6V2oCX3Hn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6V2oCX3Hn4
- im_down_w_otp 6y agoHa! Me too. I was wondering if anyone else noticed it. I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one whose mind immediately went there.
- sickcodebruh 6y agoThis was my first thought upon seeing the headline.
- ehayes 6y agoGlad I'm not the only one lol
- hprotagonist 6y agosee also, if about nine hundred years later, "there is a medieval rabbinic commentator who believes that binyamin, the son of ya’akov, was an actual werewolf, for real": https://alternativetodiscourse.tumblr.com/post/153282455622/regarding-binyamin-was-a-werewolf https://alternativetodiscourse.tumblr.com/post/153282455622/...
- Jun8 6y ago"Oh, ye immortal gods! what is theogony? Oh, thou too, mortal man! what is philanthropy? Oh, world! which was and is, what is cosmogony? Some people have accused me of misanthropy; And yet I know no more than the mahogany That forms this desk, of what they mean; Lykanthropy I comprehend, for without transformation Men become wolves on any slight occasion." Byron, Don Juan, Canto XX
- cozos 6y agoI (knowing nothing about literature) really like this poem, the way it sounds and flows. What does it mean though? Is he just saying that despite man's intellectual achievements, at the end of the day we're just brutal beastial animals?
- blacksqr 6y agoThe narrator Don Juan is saying he's not an intellectual, and doesn't really understand the big words he's studied, but he does have life experience and has observed a lot of cruelty, which to him validates the old proverb "Man is wolf to man."
- throwanem 6y agoThere is an additional joke in that the narrator's exhortations peripheral to each word all relate to that word's meaning. I don't know the poem, so can't say whether that is the narrator's joke or the author's, but it's not there by accident in any case.
- tolbish 6y agoI would have understood it on first pass if it said philosophy or philology instead of philanthropy.
- blacksqr 6y agoThe author uses the words "theogony," "cosmogony" and "philanthropy" because these are all high-minded topics whose aims in practice are to explain and justify things as they are; Byron is ironically suggesting that morality in this world is confined to academic discourse, without any application in real life, where things remain dog-eat-dog.
- tolbish 6y agoI know. I just think philanthropy does not fit with those topiphilology like philosophy/philology would.
- coderintherye 6y agoIf you are into this subject, "Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within" is a fun story/game exploring it. There is a full video play-through on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybKV6rBfzV4&t=771s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybKV6rBfzV4&t=771s And someone made an edited "movie" version of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-bryVavblw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-bryVavblw
- clint 6y ago> Werewolf bar mitzvah > Spooky scary > Boys becoming men > Men becoming wolves > Werewolf bar mitzvah > Spooky scary > Boys becoming men > Men becoming wolves
- dillondoyle 6y agoI was going to post this but didn't want to get told it was too Reddit haha. Glad I'm not the only one. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/42/81/b6/4281b602bc009999691b7a221fe545ec.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/42/81/b6/4281b602bc009999691b...
- Igelau 6y ago> Only in the second century did the medical poet Marcellus Sidetes develop the term lykanthrōpos, “lycanthrope,” Medical poet. From his Wikipedia page: > He wrote a long medical poem in Greek hexameter verse, consisting of forty-two books I'm picturing Vitruvius from the LEGO Movie saying "All this is true because it rhymes" and it passing for esteemed medical advice.
- kragen 6y agoIt's common for factual texts from the classical era to be written in verse, though less so in Rome than in India, where it was nearly universal. The Bakhshali manuscript: all verse. Panini's grammar: all verse. Most of the Tripitaka is in verse, too. Perhaps the reason is to make it feasible to memorize them, which doesn't require access to scarce writing materials, so that you can study them.
- cafard 6y agoThe notes to some book or another say that Eratosthenes wrote one of his scientific works in verse.
- stainforth 6y agoSo at least one method - peeing in a circle around your clothes (yourself as well?) to include in testing
- drak0n1c 6y agoMan was the original gender-neutral word while wereman and woman referred to the sexes. Were-wolf was a literal combination of the words male-human + wolf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Were
- colanderman 6y agoAnd "woman" in turn came from "wifman" (as did "wife") [1]. I have seen it argued that therefore a female "were"wolf is properly termed a "wifwolf". [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/woman#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/woman#Etymology
- Proven 6y agoAnd then "wife" became "waifu"
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoThe existence of the supposed Old English word “*wermann” is hypothetical; I often see an argument of symmetry made, but the word is not ever attested as far as I know. It does not exist in any dictionary or corpus search I tried; and I've seen multiple others say that they see modern speech of it, but cannot find it in a single actual O.E. text. The word for male human was “wer”, for female human was “wīf”, and while “wīfmann” and “wīfcild” are attested, “*wermann” and “*wercild” remain hypothetical and are unattested. Perhaps the word existed, and it would no doubt be understandable to any speaker of Old English, but it did not show up in any text, nor did any of it's descendants survive into modern English. There is a general trend in languages for female terms to display markedness, consider that there is no term for a specifically male actor in modern English either, though in some contexts male terms display it, such as the coinage of the word “murse” to refer to a specifically male nurse. Neutrality of words in actual use is not so simple, in any case, though it is true that the word could clearly be used to describe human beings regardless of sex, as it still sees use today: > God ġesċōp æt fruman twēġen menn, wer and wīf. > God created at the beginning, two men, a male, and a female. Usage of “mann” in O.E. to identify a single, singular female man was quite rare, as it still is today, outside of compounds such as “crewman”, but some attestations do exist, similar to the Latin “homō”, for which it was similarly rare and other words were typically used. One may be left to conclude that, though it was theoretically possible, it was stylistically not common, similar to how, perhaps, the word “actor” was used a century back where “actress” was quite often used for a female actor, al the while acknowledging that “an actor”, hypothetically speaking, could be any sex, and “actors” could easily be used for a mixed-sex group.
- redkinght99 6y agoShit Post: I read "Men Becoming Wolves" and immediately thought of that 30 Rock bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25EYLtqiyTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25EYLtqiyTo ```Werewolf Bar Mitzvah, Spooky scary, Boys becoming men, Men becoming wolves```
- ubiquitysc 6y agoOh man I'm glad I wasn't the only one!
- FrozenVoid 6y agoPerhaps 'werewolves' are a shapeshifter species that learned to mimic humans, not actual humans? It more plausible that human species isn't entirely composed of biological humans than some magical transformation to a specific animal and back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimic_octopus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimic_octopus