• Protoknuckles@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    “Blood is thicker than water” is actually “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”

    • ComfortableRaspberry@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      This is one of my favorites because the shortened version is the actual opposite of the original. My family used the short version a lot. Hearing the long version for the first time felt kind of liberating :D

      • MrConfusion@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        If you read the Wikipedia article on the matter though, the long form given here does not seem to be “the original” by any means.

        The “short” proverb is many hundred years old. The “long form” first appeared in the 1990s by a specific author.

        It’s more an interpretation to negate an old proverb that the author disagreed with than anything.

      • wieson@feddit.org
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        1 day ago

        Some time ago I looked it up, because I feared the same. There’s actually medieval examples of the full phrase.

        • FishFace@piefed.social
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          1 day ago

          There is a good writeup on the English Language stack exchange and on Wikipedia all of whose early sources are for the normal version or things like it https://english.stackexchange.com/a/508940

          If you have a better citation, please share, but since they only find the Tumblr version from the 1990s I’m saying it’s bollocks.

            • FishFace@piefed.social
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              1 day ago

              No, but to me it’s a stereotype of Tumblr users that they go fucking nuts for any of that kind of “counter-cultural secret knowledge” stuff even if it’s straight up lies.

              So I’m not saying “Tumblr version” to mean they invented it but to mean they love it and (helped) popularise it.