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I had not heard of taking small enough bites that you can always respond to a conversation; that seems such a small amount that I must be the ape they abstain f
by sethammons 3y ago
I had not heard of taking small enough bites that you can always respond to a conversation; that seems such a small amount that I must be the ape they abstain from being.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gostsamo 3y agoWell, if your liege ask you something, you should be able to reply immediately. It would be impolite to make them wait for you to end chewing. I remember in some of the musketeer books described how Portos had cut a big part of a boar while dining with the king and when the king asked him something, he had to swallow the entire piece.
- JoelMcCracken 3y agoHuh, curious, I don't remember them ever dining with the king in the musketeer books.
- gostsamo 3y agoDon't have the text handy, but Wikipedia agrees with my memory: > His eating abilities even impress King Louis XIV during a banquet at Fontainebleau. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porthos
- eru 3y agoDid you mean to write 'liege'?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gostsamo 3y agoYep, sorry. Edited now.
- eru 3y agoNo worries, I just wanted to see whether you wanted to take a subtle swing at medieval power structures.
- gostsamo 3y agoI have a subtle issue with homophones. :)
- eru 3y agoI blame English orthography for these troubles. English orthography also leads to endless stigmatisation of people who mix up the spellings of "their", "there" and "they're" or "you're" and "your" as if they were idiots or can't "think properly". Instead of the reality that they just don't display the class marker of having been drilled in this idiotic aspect of the writing system.
- gostsamo 3y agoWith me the issue is that being blind means that I listen to most words and the spelling is something which I don't always focus on unless necessary. Hence, two homophones are likely to be confused if not written often enough.
- eru 3y agoOh, yes, screen readers etc add a whole another level of complication to the mix.
- wongarsu 3y agoI guess that depends on the standards. I can talk with about half my mouth full, but doing so would be considered impolite by today's standards. At about a quarter mouth full I can push it into my cheeks to talk mostly unimpeded.
- bombcar 3y agoChipmonking is an important skill.
- foobarian 3y agoI was a bit surprised that a twelfth century source would refer to apes. Possibly the word meant something else first and was later used for big nonhuman primates?
- r13a 3y agoMedieval europeans were in direct contact with Barbary macaques. On top of African animals that were exchanged through Mediterranean sea since the Romans, Iberian populations, Christians, Muslim and Jewish had direct contact with macaques introduced by Maures.
- UncleSlacky 3y agoFrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape#Name_and_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape#Name_and_terminology : "Ape", from Old English apa, is a word of uncertain origin. The term has a history of rather imprecise usage—and of comedic or punning usage in the vernacular. Its earliest meaning was generally of any non-human anthropoid primate, as is still the case for its cognates in other Germanic languages.
- inglor_cz 3y agoCzech "opice" seems to have a common root with "ape". The older version thereof was "op", even closer to "ape". So the origin might actually be Indo-European.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoYou don't need to look back to Proto-Indo-European for a word like this. Like many other words in Slavic, this Czech word is more likely a borrowing from Germanic prior to the merger of short *a and *o to /o/ in Common Slavonic. Indeed, I just checked and it is listed on p. 200 of Pronk-Tiethoff’s The Germanic Loanwords in Proto-Slavic, the modern standard reference for these matters.
- KineticLensman 3y ago> I was a bit surprised that a twelfth century source would refer to apes. The Roman empire extended into North Africa and they would absolutely have been aware of the wildlife. Hannibal actually launched an attack on the Romans that involved bringing war elephants across the Alps [0]. Subsequent readers of Roman authors would have known about the animals the Romans knew about, e.g. [1], which in turn made their way into medieval bestiaries (along with unicorns and a few others). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal%27s_crossing_of_the_Alps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal%27s_crossing_of_the_A... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiologus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiologus
- The_Colonel 3y agoIt says "A diner should not take so large a bite that he is completely unable to speak, if he were addressed." which seems very reasonable. I can speak while having a normal sized bite in mouth, although it's of course less than ideal and not polite these days. But sometimes useful for shorter utterances.