Ok, wow… “The fishermen who first discovered the poor stranded whale started the procedure by poking its eyes out, so that it would "not be able to see us." Over the next two days, the creature was methodically axed, speared and shot until it finally died in a sea of its own blood.”
I guess it was 1865.
Humans are the worst species aren’t we
No
I think we have the greatest depth and breadth of cruelty
Our capabilities are so high and our population so differentiated we basically hold nearly all the records for everything (barring some extremeophile metrics) so it makes sense.
I wonder if the event visible in one of the photos is etymological source of the word festival?
The word can be deconstructed in Swedish as fest i val which translates to "party in whale"
It's definitively not the source of the word, but it might very well be the reason the decided to have a "fest i val". Gothenburg is famous for their puns, and even today they open up the mouth of the whale for visitors on two occasions - valdagen (election day) and Valborgsmässoafton (Walpurgis eve).
It surely is; 'fest' is the Swedish word for 'party'. I actually think Swedish or Norwegian (which are practically the same language) are closer to English than even Dutch. Many of the most common, short English words are the same.
The Anglo-Saxon migrations made England English, and then the waves of Viking invasions littered North Germanic vocabulary all over it. You can see it in doublets like skirt/shirt that aren't in other West Germanic languages.
Wiktionary says
> From Middle English festival (adjective), from Old French festival (“festive”), from Late Latin fēstīvālis, from Latin fēstīvus (“festive”). By surface analysis, festive + -al. Displaced native Old English frēols. The noun is shortened from festival day, from Middle English festival dai, festiuall day (“feast day, festival”).