this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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We generally attribute discoveries to whoever documented it first. It's almost laughable to attribute it to the French based on a kissing style that was widespread there in 1923. Surely people were doing it before then. Yet, the Americans and British found it so unique they referred to it as French kissing.
Perhaps it was common before ancient India, but then the question is, why didn't the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, Romans, and Greek document on it then?
That's the thing. France and Belgium call french fries "frites" and "frieten", which just translates to "fries". It's other cultures that gave them (wrong) names because of how they got to know them.
Arabic numerals came to Europe from India via Arabia. The Sine function does too, but it's name is garbled and doesn't mean anything.
Venetian blinds came from Persia via Venice.
Spanish Flu was everywhere, but everyone at the time was lying about it due to being at war, except for Spain.
Many First Nations peoples are known by what other peoples called them (often pejorative names) rather than their name for themselves.
Words usually aren't authoritative declarations of truth, but rather snapshots of what was a useful distinction to someone somewhere a some time. Did the French think their style of kissing was a unique cultural phenomenon? Will Skibidi be known about in 500 years? No one documents graffiti, was it "discovered" by Pompeii?
We live in a truely unique age, where nearly any question can have a relavent answer of some kind in moments. We can see people streaming everyday things from around the globe, or find the best research about what we know about ancient people's daily lives. Is any of this worth carving into a monument though? How many copies of an archeological journal are going to survive the ages vs copies of Game of Thrones? I'd say there are countless things about our lives we think are special to today that even prehistoric people did, it just isn't notable enought to build monuments to or copy manuscripts of.
We barely document how we wipe our asses or shower because it's such a mundane, day to day thing.
Writing was limited, so I hypothesize that people would focus on important things like tax collections, kingly births or even that cunt Ea-Nasir. Less so on kissing or things they would find mundane.