{"id":39534,"date":"2015-08-31T06:00:12","date_gmt":"2015-08-31T10:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uncommongoods.com\/?p=39534"},"modified":"2015-08-31T09:47:11","modified_gmt":"2015-08-31T13:47:11","slug":"uncommon-knowledge-whats-a-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/2015\/uncommon-knowledge-whats-a-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncommon Knowledge: What’s a Thing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"From<\/a><\/p>\n

What\u2019s a thing? As anyone knows, it\u2019s anything. Literally. It\u2019s an all-purpose word that can mean an object, an affair, a situation, a mild obsession or phobia (she\u2019s really got a thing about spiders), or, with a capital T, a certain large, lumpy, orange member of the Fantastic Four. But here\u2019s the thing: before it was a catch-all term, a thing<\/em>\u2014from the Old Norse <\/a>\u00feing<\/a>,<\/em> was a sort of democratic assembly held throughout the Viking lands of Northern Europe. Viking things were an early experiment with a representative system, allowing disputes to be settled through nonviolent mediation rather than by the bloody conflict that we tend to associate with the Vikings. The egalitarian, socialist principles of modern Sweden may be traced to the concept of the Viking thing. And while the modern concept of representative democracy has its roots in ancient Greece and the Iroquois confederacy, it also owes something to medieval Scandinavia.<\/p>\n

So, the next time you\u2019re going to \u201ca thing,\u201d think of the Vikings who first made a thing an official thing. Just don\u2019t picture the assembled Norsemen with horned helmets\u2026 that\u2019s an invention of the nineteenth century imagination<\/a>. For the real Vikings, sporting horns just wasn\u2019t a thing.<\/p>\n

From Little Things Planters – Set of 3 | $45<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s the thing: before it was a catch-all term, a thing\u2014from the Old Norse \u00feing, was a sort of democratic assembly held throughout the Viking lands of Northern Europe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":144,"featured_media":39673,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1208],"tags":[813],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39534"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39534"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39678,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39534\/revisions\/39678"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}