VERCINGETOROCKS

GUYS I JUST REALIZED THE ME AN INTELLECTUAL MEME IS A PERMUTATION OF OLD NORSE KENNINGS HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

explain

(I wrote a paper on it but it’s 11pm here so give me a break if I get something wrong neither english nor any scandinavian language is my native one)

kenning & heiti is substituting a word with another (heiti) or several (kenning, pl. kenningar thank you very much). (definitions here vary tho, consult an actual expert)

so for example, instead of “ship” you say “wave-steed”, “conqueror of the sea”, “Njord’s favoured”

a bottle might be “bearer of water” or "giver of life"

this went to extreme lengths like “falcon’s seat” for head because a bird sits at the highest point and also a falcon is a pretty noble bird. this is actually one of the tamer examples. the skalds were wild nerds.

i know what kennings are, but i want to know the connection with the meme

which is based on mocking hypercorrection, and replacing typically colloquial phrases with humorously incorrect pretentious ones

i mean theoretically you could make a kenning version of this meme like

you: the ocean me, an intellectual: the whale-road

but you would lose the pretentiousness because this is just a beautiful metaphor, not something pseudo-intellectuals would say

(and don’t worry your english is good)

Hold my seat fam imma try to talk more abt it when i get outta old norse study group

OK SO SO SO

@terpsikeraunos

You’re right, I spoke loosely and prematurely in saying that the intellectual meme is a kenning

Their superficial similarity is one of form: “x” becomes “outlandish/antiquated quasi-retro-permutation of x”

But kennings and memes in general do stem from the same place in that they signify a story in a concise and distilled packet of media that is not necessarily understandable at an initial viewing of someone uninitiated into the particular story-culture that surrounds them

you could call a kenning a meme, or vice-versa, with decent accuracy, but you’re right, both stem from a place of wildly different motive (poetic cognizance vs situational mockery in this case), so it would be more accurate to say that both share a fundamentally similar MO

AND THEN we have the point of apparent difference in the role of absurdity in memes. right now, x percent of people reblogging the “bode” meme are doing so because they understand the full circumstances of its origin and are sharing it as an “inside joke” meme; at the same time, y percent are reblogging because of its detached and amusing absurdity. You could argue that kennings differ fundamentally from this because of the greater emphasis placed on understanding of the stories that the discrete word-combinations signify. However, the process of enjoying a meme in a vacuum – relishing the absurdity of a “detached meme”– is in its own right a parallel to our appreciation of kennings whose definitive meanings have ultimately been lost to the world. We appreciate detached memes for the acontextual absurdity that implies an inside joke; we appreciate lost kennings for the acontextual beauty that implies an unknown history. Absurdity is to memes as beauty is to kennings, and both function on known and unknown significance. 

all in all, both memes and kennings are a cultural shibboleth, or rite of initiation, one way or another and i just really like that way of thinking of them

thanks for the clarification! so if this is about absurdity or non sequitur then kennings would not be like this meme to their original audience any more than contemporary lyric conventions are to us, but it could be similar to the meme now wrt how we might now receive kennings out of context

which is to say i need to make a non sequitur old english meme now

@the-everythingsquirrel

@inkvellir You: meme Me, an intellectual: joy of sneks/ image of the word screen/ liquid of the thought coffer of the nerd

every time i see this it gets better keep up the good work guys <3

the aeneid but everytime vergil says pietas it gets faster

tag yourself im davus

can’t believe they changed the hollywood sign again

The Results Are Brutal

Happy birthday Marcus Tullius Cicero!! He means so much to me and he is celebrating with me and @thoodleoo

Remember that time Samuel Butler wrote a book about how the author of the Odyssey was a woman and then spent a whole paragraph complaining about how ‘Argus’ is not a good name for a dog and how that the scene between Argus and Odysseus is the most disappointing scene in the whole poem?

“Argus is not a very good name for a dog. It is the stock epithet for hounds in both “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” and means “fleet.” The whole scene between Ulysses and Argus is perhaps the most disappointing in the “Odyssey.” If the dog was too old or feeble to come to Ulysses, Ulysses should have gone up to him and hugged him—fleas or no fleas; and Argus should not have been allowed to die till this had been put in evidence. True, Ulysses does wipe away one tear, but he should have broken utterly down—and then to ask Eumæus whether Argus was any use, or whether he was only a show dog—this will not do even as acting. The scene is well conceived but badly executed; it betrays the harder side of the writer’s nature, and has little of the pathos which Homer would have infused into it.”

Okay, Sammy, whatever you say. 

This was written literally written in 1897 what the fuck 

i love classics tumblr bc we’re all so happy with what we’re studying and we’re just here sharing translations and ancient jokes about our favorite people in history and its so happy

we’re starting a clique of classics blogs reblog this and follow @softjan-stevens and @diomdes if you are interested !

every day that i dont own this, i lose 5 years off of my life

It’s so much easier to find langblrs that have the word “languages” or “polyglot” in the url, so if you are a langblr that DOESN’T have these words in the url, please reblog this so I can take a look at your blog and perhaps follow it!

I love greek mythology.

i hope all the bots following me have developed a more nuanced understanding of the importance of women in the classical literary tradition

I haven’t really started looking at this yet (I only found it last night), but I’ve got a feeling that it’s going to be my jam. And there’s a paper in here about Athenian democracy too, awesome.

Circë offering the Cup to Ulysses - Oil on canvas - John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) - c. 1891