"Ancient Egyptian texts dating from 2750 BCE referred to these fish as the "Thunderer of the Nile"'
-wikipedia electricity
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
9 points (100.0% liked)
Jokes and Humor
6197 readers
107 users here now
A broad community for text and image based jokes, humor, and memes.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
spicy noodles
Electricity was discovered by the first guy looking at a thunderstorm, so they were called "thunder fish".
The word "electricity" was invented to describe the property of attracting straws after rubbing some wool on an "electron", which was associated with "sunbeam" and was the Greek word for amber (which in turn got its name after people conflated the ambergris or "gray amber" derived from sperm whales, with the fossilized tree resin or "yellow amber"... and the whales got their name from whale oil or "spermaceti"... which yes, people thought was whale semen that just happened to burn great in candles).
PS: blow the candle and sweet dreams... 🌬️🕯️
zappy slithers
Ouchie fishy
Actual serious answer: electric eels are exclusively South American, so the indigenous peoples there probably do have their own names for them which would likely pre-date the discovery of electricity.
(Electric fish known to other cultures would have been electric catfish, not electric eels.)
According to this, in ancient Egypt they were called the thunder of the Nile, or the angry catfish! haha
https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/education/electricity-usage-ancient-civilizations
💢🐟
Lightning snakes
This, more that likely. Lightning has been around long before man poked out of his cave. And we know that back in the days of Vikings, pretty much anything that slithered was deemed a serpent.
But lightning is this huge deathray from the gods. The fish are just very tingly and ouchy and makes you twitch.
It's not a twitch, if I recall correctly- you get fully paralyzed and dragged under water
From what I hear, Electric Eels does more than just tingly and ouchy stuff.