The Sausage of Destiny
Dec. 6th, 2025 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taylingToday I found out that wyrd and wurst come from the same PIE ancestor, reconstructed as *wert; to twist. I only got here because yesterday I spent a good bit of time thinking about wurst etymology following a texted vowel swap joke about the worst cat in the history of katjes. (Incidentally, this is how I learned Finnish with some Swedish help shifted knackwurst into something utterly alien.)
So there I was minding my own business, about to learn about a repeating air rifle* from the 1780s and how the Austrians had—owing to how the rifles worked by way of air-tight brazed sheet iron air reservoirs holding compressed air—wagons with air pumps on the battlefield... and my mind pings to thinking about a past conversation about wyrd. I don't know why. (Maybe because I'd a bit earlier pondered the aftermath of a compressed air reservoir exploding while you're aiming down sights. Could be.)
Nonetheless, I was thinking about wyrd and thought I could use a quick refresher. Seeing as I already had an open Wikipedia page, the first thing my eyes snapped to was in the company some very familiar (dead) Germanic words from the previous day. A meaning to one of the words; to twist. And below in another paragraph an aside about weorþan from Old English and its meaning (to become.) I blinked. I reached for, couldn't find, yesterday's tab and so opened a new wurst tab (sorry question mark?) for a sanity check... aaaaand yes, hello. To twist. With an aside about weorþan.
Not gonna lie, it feels like the universe is trolling me again. You also have no idea how hard it has been to not end this with some kind of destined to fail sausage jo
* The Girardoni air rifle, by a fascinating man by the name of Bartolomeo Girardoni; a watchmaker and gunsmith who also built himself a prosthetic left hand to replace the one he lost in an unelaborated gun accident.
So there I was minding my own business, about to learn about a repeating air rifle* from the 1780s and how the Austrians had—owing to how the rifles worked by way of air-tight brazed sheet iron air reservoirs holding compressed air—wagons with air pumps on the battlefield... and my mind pings to thinking about a past conversation about wyrd. I don't know why. (Maybe because I'd a bit earlier pondered the aftermath of a compressed air reservoir exploding while you're aiming down sights. Could be.)
Nonetheless, I was thinking about wyrd and thought I could use a quick refresher. Seeing as I already had an open Wikipedia page, the first thing my eyes snapped to was in the company some very familiar (dead) Germanic words from the previous day. A meaning to one of the words; to twist. And below in another paragraph an aside about weorþan from Old English and its meaning (to become.) I blinked. I reached for, couldn't find, yesterday's tab and so opened a new wurst tab (sorry question mark?) for a sanity check... aaaaand yes, hello. To twist. With an aside about weorþan.
Not gonna lie, it feels like the universe is trolling me again. You also have no idea how hard it has been to not end this with some kind of destined to fail sausage jo
* The Girardoni air rifle, by a fascinating man by the name of Bartolomeo Girardoni; a watchmaker and gunsmith who also built himself a prosthetic left hand to replace the one he lost in an unelaborated gun accident.
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Date: 2025-12-07 06:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-07 07:20 am (UTC)