> The question is: what did the original users of the term mean by it?
African Rhinoceros!
I don't remember the details but I think it was something on the line of a description of "a large horse with a single large horn". Now if you imagine a large _gray_ horse with a single large horn it looks quite similar to a Rihno from afar.
Now where does the things about its horn being magical come from? Well Rihno horns are believed to have "magic" properties.
And what about it being white? It was added later, by people which never had seen it, I mean what is the most "stunning" looking real horse? A grate white one (for many people).
As a side note the unicorn from Siberia did exist alongside with humans, but is likely too old, to matter for the term unicorn. Through skeletons of it might have played a role, maybe.
The sentence it had been asked to complete ended with “… the resulting animal will look like an”. I suspect “equine” wasn’t the product of caution, but of matching the article an. (There may still be some English accents that use “an horse”—perhaps some Indian and some parts of England—but the vast majority now use “a horse”.)
> And do we know if all horses can even learn to write emails? What if it requires very smart horses? How many horses are there in Iceland and how many of them are email-grade horses?
Well...
A horse is a horse - of course, of course - and no one can talk to a horse of course. That is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mr. Ed.
Nothing weird at all. After I learned horse riding (focus: dressage) I started seeing horse-related stuff everywhere - horse carrying trailers on roads, shops, etc.
The "secret" is not some deep universe related mystery but your perception. Those horse-related things were there all along - I just never paid attention, my mind filtered it without any of it ever reaching my consciousness. Your mind filters out lots and lots of headlines when you scroll through the news or HN, your brain reacts when something is relevant.
That there has to be something relevant even if it's niche once in a while is not exactly shocking when HN goes through several dozens of headlines every single day. The site shows you so many diverse topics, it would be strange if you never have this experience.
> But there is one horse, that not only has an infinite number of legs, it has legs that are infinitely long.
You had me until this one. Even the tortured logic made sense to me until this point and it feels like this was just shoehorned in to make it work..unless I'm missing something?
But to make clear what I was saying, I really should have responded to the parent, who says: "It's extremely hard to believe that even a malicious scientist could convince himself that a horse cannot be ridden into town."
My point being that a malicious test-giver could certainly deny that as a valid answer. I don't know that I believe that anecdote happened, but it is assuming good faith to think that it couldn't happen because no one would ever reject "horse" as an answer.
> What interests me about this Finnish subculture is that it's perfectly cloned the "horse culture", just without any actual horses. It's very close to a cargo cult. Possibly Finland is too cold to have a regular horse culture?
I assumed this was why the hobbyhorse culture was female -- whatever the reasons are for horses to be a female interest, hobbyhorses are an imitation and necessarily target the same demographic.
Horses are expensive; it seems natural to me that enthusiasts who don't have real horses might be drawn to an imitation.
> There are almost certainly blacksmiths in your country, most of them have concentrated on either farrier (horseshoing) or ornamental work.
Yes, as I wrote, my cousin is one of them.
When shoeing a horse you carry a good chunk of the weight of the horse, and that's before we get into the kind of contortions you have to go through to do a proper job mostly under a horse.
African Rhinoceros!
I don't remember the details but I think it was something on the line of a description of "a large horse with a single large horn". Now if you imagine a large _gray_ horse with a single large horn it looks quite similar to a Rihno from afar.
Now where does the things about its horn being magical come from? Well Rihno horns are believed to have "magic" properties.
And what about it being white? It was added later, by people which never had seen it, I mean what is the most "stunning" looking real horse? A grate white one (for many people).
As a side note the unicorn from Siberia did exist alongside with humans, but is likely too old, to matter for the term unicorn. Through skeletons of it might have played a role, maybe.
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