Today I learned

That unusual therapy is all very well—or perhaps not—but its existence among some pre-Columbian peoples of the Western Hemisphere and some post-Columbian peoples of eighteenth-century Europe does little to explain why the slang expression "blow smoke up [someone's] ass" emerged only in the 1940s or later. My guess is that the historical practice is only coincidentally related to the modern expression.

But if the weird medical practice isn't the source of the slang term, what is? I suspect that the answer is amplification: sometimes a slang term that has been around for a while acquires new cachet thanks to a snappy word replacement or an edgier extension. But if this simply a case of amplification, a couple of other phenomena are likely: (1) we might see alternative extended versions of "blow smoke"—especially in the period before "blow smoke up [someone's] ass" comes into frequent use—that use less startling words than "ass"; and (2) we ought to see "blow smoke up [someone's] ass" being used not just for "blowing smoke" definition 2 above, but for definitions 1 and 3 as well.

I never went as far as to defend Gwyneth Paltrow, but after her Hot Ones appearance I created a post (which I will link in the comments) where I suggested that she's done no more harm than male grifters and that the dislike of her as a person was primarily due to misogyny. That's before I learned about her promotion of these unproven "vampire facials". Now an unlicensed clinic performing this procedure has given at least three women HIV. You guys were right and I was wrong.

Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, manuscripts in Aramaic, Arabic, and Hebrew, the illuminated Christian Gospels, the Talmud, the Koran—with these forms and collections of writing came the expectation that a person would read them out loud and would, in a manner of speaking, conjure their reality. In his book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel points out that Aramaic and Hebrew, the “primordial” languages of the Bible, draw no distinction between reading and speaking. The same word stands for both. Buddhism and Hinduism also give an exalted place to the spoken word.

The opening words of The Odyssey—“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story”—make this clear: The storyteller is acknowledging at the start that the tale he tells is not his own, and that he hopes for divine assistance in telling it well.

I think it is pretty interesting that people engaged with reading this way. The author of this article notes that it becomes a living story. This also had the benefit of reaching persons that could not read. I wonder if the content was remembered more vividly through both seeing and hearing the words.

mander.xyz is a pretty small instance devoted to science and nature communities. It's relatively tiny compared to lemmy.ml and beehaw.org. In order for a community to appear in the smaller instance's community list it must first be "fetched". To do this, you have to enter the full url for the community you want to fetch into the community search bar.

So for example, I was trying to find !nfl@lemmy.ml and it just wasn't coming up in the mander.xyz community list. I tried entering "nfl", "!nfl@lemmy.ml" into the search bar. I even navigated to https://mander.xyz/c/nfl@lemmy.ml which was giving me a 404 at the time but is now working after the fetch.

So if you're on a smaller instance and aren't seeing communities from larger instances, try entering the url of the community as it would be hosted from the larger instance. Hit enter to do a fetch, then try typing the name of the community again to execute the search.

PS: I had to do the same trick again on mander.xyz to find this community.