by Christina Anikari » Sat Dec 23, 2006 9:00 pm
Oh, i didn't insult your intelligence or education. I insulted the one who started the trend as turkey legs are apparently served at all rennaisance fairs. Even intelligent and learned people like you can perpetuate misconceptions if it is about a topic they don't have any particular interest in, i have done it quite often even about topics i do have an interest in and have researched. There is no shame in that, what there is a shame in is being enough of a professional to arrange a thing like a rennaisance fair and not even bothering to check simple facts about the subject matter like the fact that turkeys are from America and that America wasn't discovered until 1492 at the very end of the middle ages, if you arrange something related to the middle ages then these are quite basic facts to find. So unless you yourself have been responsible for the research for rennaisance fairs it would by no means be fair to blame you for that lack in knowledge, you would have to know there was a problem in the presentation to ever actually study it and that would require you to know what was wrong already. And even if you know it was wrong and was merely joking, which is probably the most likely thing at play here i will once more point out that i don't blame you for the association of turkey legs and the middle ages. And due to both of these i would like to apologize for the insult you clearly felt from me previous statement. It was not directed at you even though my shoddy writing made it seem like that, it was directed at the nameless, faceless person who introduced the association between the two in the first place.
Also i know i let my temper run off with me there, but large holes in knowledge like that bugs me. And it is especially frustrating when being a historian since everybody think they know about history which has forced me to endure endless amounts of nonsense that has been passed of as fact by people in authority. Hearing about how Germany has always tried to steal Denmark away, despite there not having been a unified Germany until 1873, is about as painful to a historian as it would be for an english major to be told that Hamlet is a fine example of antique theatre, and i get to hear things like that every single time i open a newspaper, watch the news in TV or in any other way get in touch with political debate. It is quite hard on the nerves.