Which One Of U Was Going To Tell Me That Tea Tastes Different If U Put It In Hot Water?

consider: teenagers aren’t apathetic about everything they’re just used to you shitting all over whatever they show excitement about

hey... don't cry.... tesla recall for most cybertrucks, okay? >46,000 vehicles affected <3

Follow for the same picture of a rock every day

[ image id: a picture of a grey and white rock on a white background, with a stock photo water mark overlaid on it end id]

arald: be concise: who is will treaty?

gilan: he’s a nerd.

horace: my right-hand man.

erak: the guy who "wouldn't tell me where halt hides his coffee stash under threat of death".

halt: one of the bravest men i know.

alyss, affectionately: a guy with a spine of steel, but that spine is actually the stick shoved up his ass.

gilan, again: a total fucking NERD.

george, scribbling things down: currently polling #3 on the list of sexiest rangers in the corps.

delia: my own personal hero whose name i might have tattooed on my arse once.

edwina, sighing: the guy whose name my daughter got tattooed on her arse once.

madelyn: my honorary dadm

crowley: my third-biggest headache.

gilan, still talking: a stupid idiot NERD.

jenny: the only reason i still have a boyfriend.

evanlyn: the only senior ranger in the group chat who didn’t take the piss out of me for drawing little hearts around horace's name on the battle strategies…

gilan, holding a struggling will in a headlock: my stupid little best friend second apprentice NERD

please please please please reblog if you’re a writer and have at some point felt like your writing is getting worse. I need to know if I’m the only one who’s struggling with these thoughts

Best one shot I've ever read lmao

Have you seen this post?

You probably have. It currently has over 120,000 notes, largely because of this addition.

Of course it's going to get reblogged, this kind of unsourced factoid does numbers on here. But something about it wasn't quite right.

A bit of searching turned up the origin of the "fact".

Alright, so it's someone who posted this on reddit 4 years ago and somehow ended up in the search hits. And the post confuses the electric eel (from South America) with the electric catfish (from the Nile, which the Egyptians would have known about).

Reminder: this is an electric eel (Electrophorus electricus). It is from South America. (image from Wikipedia)

And this is an electric catfish (Malapterurus electricus). It is from the Nile and would have been familiar to the ancient Egyptians. (image from Wikipedia)

And then of course people were speculating in the notes to that post about trade routes between South America and Egypt. Excellent scholarship everyone.

At this point I was ready to call it another made-up internet fact that gets reified by people repeating it. But something was still bothering me.

An ancient Egyptian slab from 3100 BC. What could that be...

Oh.

The Narmer palette. It's the goddamn Narmer palette. (image, once again, from Wikipedia)

So where is this "angry catfish"?

It's not the Egyptian name for the electric catfish.

It's... Narmer. It's Narmer himself.

Narmer's name is written as above (detail of top middle of the palette), using the catfish (n`r) and the chisel (mr), giving N'r-mr. The chisel is associated with pain, so this reads as "painful catfish", "striking catfish", or, yes, "angry catfish" or other similar variants, although some authors have suggested that it means "Beloved of [the catfish god] Nar".

So.

Where does this leave us?

It would appear that this redditor not only confused electric eels with electric catfish, but also confused a Pharaoh's name with the name of a fish. And then it got pushed to the top search hits by a crappy search engine and shared uncritically on tumblr.

In short, "the electric eel is called angry catfish" factoid actually literacy error. Angry Catfish, who ruled upper Egypt and smote his enemies, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

Also the Arabic name for the electric catfish is raad (thunder) or raada (thunderer).

References

Afsaruddin, A., & Zahniser, A. H. M. (1997). Humanism, culture, and language in the Near East: studies in honor of Georg Krotkoff. Eisenbrauns.

Clayton, P. A. (2001). Chronicle of the Pharaohs. Thames & Hudson.

Godron, G. (1949). A propos du nom royal. Annales du Service des antiquités de l'Egypte, 49, 217-221.

Sperveslage, G., & Heagy, T. C. (2023). A tail's tale: Narmer, the catfish, and bovine symbolism. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 109(1), 3-319.

i’m home sick with the flu and i just received this email from my father