reminder that Winnie the Pooh wore a crop top and ate his fave food and loved himself and u can too
His friends were a pig with anxiety, a donkey with chronic depression, a single mom kangaroo and her kid, a bossy obsessive control-freak rabbit, a tiger with ADHD, and a pompous but dyslexic owl, and he loves them and they love him.
if it interests you, Pooh (whose formal name is Edward Bear) made his first appearance in a poem written in 1924, before A.A. Milne wrote the books. It’s rather sweet – a bouncy little kid’s poem that touches on the importance of representation, societal expectations vs. self confidence, changing fashions (!) and using positive role models. It’s about a teddy bear who worries about whether his body shape is okay, until he meets a handsome king who is fat. The bear decides that he is happy with his body.
You can’t just offhandedly say that Pooh’s real name is Edward Bear
forbidden Pooh lore
Edward Bear is the bear’s formal name – Teddy Bear is his nickname, since Teddy can be short for Edward. Christopher Robin then gave him a second name. He is called Pooh after a swan*, Winnie after an actual historical bear, and “ther” to apparently make it masculine.
Introduction to Winnie-the-Pooh (1926):
If you happen to have read another book about Christopher Robin, you may remember that he once had a swan (or the swan had Christopher Robin, I don’t know which), and that he used to call this swan Pooh. That was a long time ago, and when we said good-bye, we took the name with us, as we didn’t think the swan would want it any more. Well, when Edward Bear said that he would like an exciting name all to himself, Christopher Robin said at once, without stopping to think, that he was Winnie-the-Pooh. And he was. So, as I have explained the Pooh part, I will now explain the rest of it…
“Winnie” comes from the historical bear, above. She was an orphaned female bear from Canada who was brought to England by a Canadian soldier who arrived to fight in World War 1. He named her “Winnipeg” after his home province. Winnipeg moved to the London Zoo, where she was famous and beloved, and Christopher Robin admired her very much as a boy.
Then you put it together, in Chapter 1:
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh.
When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to say, ‘But I thought he was a boy?’
‘So did I,” said Christopher Robin.
‘Then you can’t call him Winnie?’
‘I don’t.’
‘But you said – ’
“He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don’t you know what “ther” means?”
“Ah, yes, now I do,’ I said quickly; and I hope you do too, because it is all the explanation you are going to get.
don’t you know what “ther” means
and that is why Edward Bear is called Winnie-the-Pooh. And people just don’t question it. It’s just accepted.
* As explained in “When We Were Very Young” : “Christopher Robin, who feeds this swan in the mornings, has given him the name of ‘Pooh.’ This is a very fine name for a swan, because, if you call him and he doesn’t come (which is a thing swans are good at), then you can pretend that you were just saying ‘Pooh!’ to show him how little you wanted him.””
One small comment: “Teddy” bear doesn’t come from Pooh’s original name, but from Theodore Roosevelt. Other than that this is amazing.
I think the implication is that Edward Bear got his name by back formation, not that Pooh is the source of the name – that is, “Edward Bear” is Edward because it’s a nickname for Teddy.
Hm, interesting. I’d have to do some research to be sure but I don’t think so? At least from what I know of Pooh’s lore and backstory, the original name of the bear is Edward Bear, then the names of the swan and the bear formed the more familiar name. Interesting thought on the back formation!
No, you’re right, I just don’t think the comments were suggesting that the name “Teddy bear” is derived from “Edward Bear” rather than from Teddy Roosevelt, but that “Edward” makes sense as a name for a bear because it’s a more formal version of Teddy (even though teddy bears are named for a Theodore rather than an Edward). And then he got all his other names as you say 🙂
Looking back at the particular comment I was referring to, the way they said “Edward Bear is the bear’s formal name – Teddy Bear is his nickname, since Teddy can be short for Edward” sounds as if they’re saying this particular bear was at some point called Teddy, which he never was. That’s where the confusion is from!
(If you told four-year-old me that 20 years later there’d be serious discussions on the origins of Pooh’s name… I’d be pretty happy actually.)
@skeleton-richard I reccomend you guys reading the poem “Teddy Bear,” which I posted upthread and set this off! You’ll probably enjoy it, it is sweet.
This poem is about the eponymous Teddy, “Teddy Bear”, and the bear is referred to interchangeably as Teddy and Mr. Edward Bear. This is absolutely, comprehensively, down in the history books, Christopher Robin would tell you himself, the actual same physical literal teddy bear as Pooh.
The Milne family was British, and the British were less interested in Theodore Roosevelt; they had plenty of Teddy bears by the 1920s, but they weren’t in the Bull Moose fandom, so they had no particular reason to insist on their Teddies all being inherently Theodores. So as a clear back-formation from “Teddy”, Milne named the bear Edward. The bear was both Edward and Teddy when the poem was written in 1924.
Christopher Robin, being a child, then assigned a more childish name when he became verbal and imaginative. By 1926, Mr Edward Bear was in the literature as Winnie-the-Pooh.
“kids these days are so cringey w their fortnite dances-” are none of yall going to acknowledge the shit we did. are we not going to acknowledge gangnam style. what does the fox say. if we go older hamster dance. crazy frog. the fucking duck song. the llama song. charlie the unicorn.
“Genghis Khan sired four self-indulgent sons who proved good at drinking, mediocre in fighting, and poor at everything else; yet their names live on despite the damage they did to their father’s empire. Although Genghis Khan recognized the superior leadership abilities of his daughters and left them strategically important parts of his empire, today we cannot even be certain how many daughters he had. In their lifetime they could not be ignored, but when they left the scene, history closed the door behind them and let the dust of centuries cover their tracks. Those Mongol queens were too unusual, too difficult to understand or explain. It seemed more convenient just to erase them.”
—
Part of the introduction to The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued his Empire by Jack Weatherford.
Honestly, my favorite thing at the moment is all the marvel headcanons where Hela wasn’t cray-cray homicidal, and she’s an overprotective bitchy sister.
the more reviews I read about Venom the more I actually kinda want to see it
An anguished question from a Trump supporter: “Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?”
The serious answer: Here’s what we really think about Trump supporters – the rich, the poor, the malignant and the innocently well-meaning, the ones who think and the ones who don’t…
That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought “Fine.”
That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, “Okay.”
That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, “No problem.”
That when he made up stories about seeing muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, “Not an issue.”
That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn’t care, you chirped, “He sure knows me.”
That when you heard him illustrate his own character by telling that cute story about the elderly guest bleeding on the floor at his country club, the story about how he turned his back and how it was all an imposition on him, you said, “That’s cool!”
That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw.
That when you heard him brag that he doesn’t read books, you said, “Well, who has time?”
That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, “That makes sense.”
That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, “Yes!”
That when you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a man’s coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, “What a great guy!”
That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, “Thumbs up!”
That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, “That’s the way I want my President to be.”
That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they’re supposed to be regulating and you have said, “What a genius!”
That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, “That’s smart!”
That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was the middle of water and you have said, “That makes sense.”
That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, “falling in love” with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, “That’s statesmanship!”
That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids. has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas – he explains that they’re just “animals” – and you say, “well, ok then.”
That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise.
What you don’t get, Trump supporters in 2018, is that succumbing to frustration and thinking of you as stupid may be wrong and unhelpful, but it’s also…hear me…charitable.
Because if you’re NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are *less* flattering.
Sometimes I feel like there’s a hole inside of me, an emptiness that at times seems to burn. I think if you lifted my heart to your ear, you could probably hear the ocean.
missionlameturtle 