Discussion
www.atlasobscura.com
pottertheotter: Ok, wow… “The fishermen who first discovered the poor stranded whale started the procedure by poking its eyes out, so that it would "not be able to see us." Over the next two days, the creature was methodically axed, speared and shot until it finally died in a sea of its own blood.”I guess it was 1865.
AIorNot: Humans are the worst species aren’t we
readthenotes1: No
amarant: I wonder if the event visible in one of the photos is etymological source of the word festival?The word can be deconstructed in Swedish as fest i val which translates to "party in whale"
thomassmith65: It surely is; 'fest' is the Swedish word for 'party'. I actually think Swedish or Norwegian (which are practically the same language) are closer to English than even Dutch. Many of the most common, short English words are the same.
tdeck: Wiktionary says> From Middle English festival (adjective), from Old French festival (“festive”), from Late Latin fēstīvālis, from Latin fēstīvus (“festive”). By surface analysis, festive + -al. Displaced native Old English frēols. The noun is shortened from festival day, from Middle English festival dai, festiuall day (“feast day, festival”).https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/festival
squibonpig: I think we have the greatest depth and breadth of cruelty
ostacke: It's definitively not the source of the word, but it might very well be the reason the decided to have a "fest i val". Gothenburg is famous for their puns, and even today they open up the mouth of the whale for visitors on two occasions - valdagen (election day) and Valborgsmässoafton (Walpurgis eve).
vova_hn2: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xat6DKLiuo
rob74: "Fest" is also German for celebration - but just because several Germanic languages have the same word doesn't mean that it's a Germanic word. Actually all of them got it from Latin...
ChocolateGod: [delayed]
QuadmasterXLII: A pretty poor showing by the villagers. whalers were able to kill a full grown whale in at most a couple of hours, while it was trying to swim away, while balancing in rowboats.
fellowniusmonk: Our capabilities are so high and our population so differentiated we basically hold nearly all the records for everything (barring some extremeophile metrics) so it makes sense.
squibonpig: It helps we write the record categories. We only measure stuff we find relevant to our existence which happens to be what we probably do sorta well.
fellowniusmonk: Yeah, cool, what categories do you have in mind? Sure we have bias but not infinite bias.I'll start!How about sea urchin destruction? I bet otters and sheepshead fish probably have little bookies keeping track and they know which species or virus hold the records! Very fun stuff! I bet they have little tablets to keep track of their records that go back thousands of years? Oh man, yeah, good point about species bias!
