Notes on a pun · 9:33pm Apr 1st, 2022
So as part of the Seven Trials chapter 3 edits last month I was doing some worldbuilding. I was looking around the mlp wiki for canonical Old World locations that could fit into my plans when I remembered that there is a pony New Orleans, "New Horseleans", mentioned in the comics. And from there things quickly got screwy.
See, it struck me that if there's a New Horseleans in modern Equestria then there must be an old Horseleans in Prance. "Hm," I thought to myself, "I wonder where the name comes from". As it turns out Orléans is actually named after the Roman emperor Aurelian, who built a city there during his campaigning in Gaul. This suited me just fine, I already have an ancient Roaman Empire in the history of pre-Royal Sisters Equestria (pegasus culture is heavily Greco-Roman-inspired, after all), but I was just very unsure about the name. "Horseleans" is a pretty lazy pun to begin with, and I needed more material to work with.
So I dug deeper, hoping that maybe finding a good pony pun name for Aurelian himself would help the process. Aurelian, conveniently for equine symbolism, was a cavalry commander before he became emperor during the period of history charmingly dubbed "the Crisis of the Third Century", and his name means "golden". He is notable for reconquering breakaway provinces in both the eastern and western parts of the empire, for which he was given the title "Restitutor Orbis", "Restorer of the World" (somewhat prematurely, since Aurelian was then assassinated by his own soldiers because this is the Crisis of the Third Century and that's just how we roll, but that's beyond the scope of my task). Adding to the golden and spherical theme he also made the cult of Sol Invictus into an official Roman religion.
So taken all together it seems a name like, say, Golden Orb would be appropriate for him. Or maybe Golden Globe. I don't know if Aurelian was a lover of the theatre but hey, some artistic license is permitted. But I'm not really any closer to fitting the city name "Horseleans", even if there were centuries of linguistic drift along the way. For comparison's sake the linguistic drift is also part of the history (although it hasn't yet made it into the text), where the Prankish (or possibly Pronkish) Kingdom of Pony Charlemagne eventually came to be known as Prance, organically developing meaningless words like "Prench". Because language do be like that sometimes.
So at the current time I still don't even have an answer. But I felt like letting you peek behind the curtain and see the kinds of work I have at times put into coming up with a properly satisfying pony pun.
Sources: Basically everything I know about the Crisis of the Third Century comes from OSP. Or wikipedia.
Also I'm sick at the moment and feel like garbage. So please appreciate the focus it took to write this, which I maybe should have spent more wisely on taking better care of myself instead, but pony pun commitment runs deep
I tested covid-negative yesterday when I was just feeling something coming on and today was absolutely awful. Gonna take another test tomorrow and take it from there. Now I should probably go to bed.
I love these etymological rabbit holes because I go down them all the time in the name of top-tier pony puns and then I end up with some abomination of language that literally no one else understands. XD
Presumably Golden Orb/Globe’s name was in the local Latin equivalent, so you still have the auraceous start to the process. The question is how the horse gets involved. Maybe something involving the local Iberian peninsula?
Take care!
5647949
It is great fun.
Something else I would normally do is just replace the name of the famous ruler with the name of their favorite horse: Llamrei for King Arthur, Bucephalus for Alexander the Great, and Tencendur for Charlemagne. But near as I can tell history has not recorded the name of Aurelian's steed, forcing me to search for other options. Maybe my google-fu is just weak, but searching for Aurelian's horse just brings up hits about his wars and his cavalry.
5647957
I'll keep digging and see what comes up. At some point. When I feel better.
After I finished the second draft of chapter 3 last month I moved on to chapter 4, and had a great time working on it. It's unambiguously a great chapter and I can't wait for people to see it :D I finished that in two weeks and had just moved on to chapter 5 when things tumbled here and now I'm going to have to wait and see how long it takes before I'm up to seriously working again. I feel no better this morning unfortunately
5648020
Will do!
I hope you are feeling better. If it's migraines that ail you, there have been advances in the treatment scene in the last 20 years. Some protein pill, I think it's the critical nutritive ingredient in cat food... Tr-something. Lemme look it up. Ah, easy queasy stomach squeezy: triptans for migraines. Looks like some kind of double aromatic ring. Anyway, migraines: triptans or gepants. As for cat diet, I was mis-remembering 'taurine'. 9_9 Don't eat cat food. It's tasteless.
Now what was it I came here to say? Um...
Oh yeah! That 'horse' thing! "Horseleans" looks like a forgotten placeholder name, like the writer meant to go back and find something other than "oat" for a horse pun twist on a word starting with 'o'.
That's it.
Happy trails!
5648023
for me, at this point I would probably just go with "New Aurleans" and let people wonder :B
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Really, the simplest and best and funniest solution would be to have Clover or someone say "I don't know how a city named after Aurelian Orbis somehow turned into 'Horseleans', even with centuries of linguistic drift."
Or something like that, but with better comedic timing. I'm still sick here today, though still testing negative for covid at least. But it's making it hard to words good.
5648157
Give yourself the time to heal.
And then drop the terrible horse puns, because that is the right approach. :D Just move "even with centuries of linguistic drift" to the front of the sentence, that oughta fix it.
5648231
You speak wise words.
For anyone checking in out of curiosity or concern, I felt a lot better today.
5648374
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That is good news!
Interesting! Thanks. :)
5648374
Guilty as charged! (Albeit a day later.) Good to hear you're feeling better. ^_^