“for some reason…” Huh, wonder why they had that idea?
Suet624 🥴 2mo
AnnCrystal 😢 2mo
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“for some reason…” Huh, wonder why they had that idea?
So, today I learned that
a. Mt. Everest was named for, but not by, George Everest.
b. George Everest was actually a proponent of learning the local name of mountains he surveyed, rather than coming up with new English names.
and c. He hated it when people pronounced his name Ever-est, rather than Eve-rest.
“We instinctively think of mountains as eternal, but they‘re not. They are falling to bits and being remade like the rest of nature - like us.”
pickLast read of the year because I only have two more hours and the library history is way longer than that. I REALLY liked it, possibly most in Pastoureau's entire series on the colors. Due to black's on-and-off history as counting as a color, this goes a little bit more in depth in historical color ideas. Also some truly bonkers looks into medieval worldviews. Love it.
Pastoureau agrees with me! Two people in the "the 17th century was the WORST century" club!
"I confess that I have never believed in a universal system of colors independent of time and place and shared by all civilizations. On the contrary, I have always stressed that the problems and stakes related to color are cultural, strictly cultural, and prohibited the historian from disregarding eras and geographical areas."
Good to know that I'm agreeing with an expert.
pickRead for background information for my writing.
Nice illustrated history of the colour blue, open on an Egyptian page - not necessarily representative of the book as a whole, which is mostly Western-centric, but I like the painting and the shades of blue in it 😁
