What animal is a “weefil”?

Question

What animal is depicted in this image labelled “weefil”?

Answer 1

f  vs  ſ

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That’s merely a “long s”, not an f.

Therefore, it is not a weefil but rather a weeſil — meaning of course, a weasel.

We can rule out weevil be­cause it has the look not of a bug but of a muste­line crit­ter.

Here are some ex­am­ples in var­i­ous faces — name­ly, in ro­man, ital­ic, script, un­cial, and black­let­ter faces — of just how con­fus­ing this can some­times be to the un­ini­ti­at­ed:

Although the “long s” is per­haps es­pe­cial­ly known for its use in black­let­ter (al­so known as Frak­tur) faces, and black­let­ter forms are of­ten as­so­ci­at­ed with Ger­many, in fact the long s orig­i­nat­ed in Ro­man times, long be­fore Gut­en­berg in­vent­ed mov­able type. It was reg­u­lar­ly used in hand­writ­ing for many, many cen­turies, and sur­vived in­to our mod­ern ro­man and ital­ic faces as shown above.

The let­ter that re­mains part of Ger­man but is no longer used in English is the “sharp s”, which orig­i­nat­ed as a lig­a­ture con­nect­ing a “long s” with a “round s”: ſ + s = β, in a man­ner of speak­ing. Some of the spe­ci­mi­na shown above make this es­pe­cial­ly ob­vi­ous if you look close­ly at the dif­fer­ence on the end of sin­ful­ness and self­ish­ness as shown in the sec­ond ver­sus the third col­umn.

See al­so the ques­tion Dur­ing what pe­ri­od of his­to­ry did English use “ß”, the “sharp s” lig­a­ture?

Answer 2

That's not an F, it's an S. You can tell because the bar doesn't cross the stem. Once you figure that out, it's pretty easy to deduce that weesil is an old spelling of weasel. Plus, the picture is obviously of something weasel-oid.

Here's a pretty good overview of the history of the long S in printing, including the rules (or rather, lack thereof) for using long vs. short S: “The Long S in Colonial Sense”.

Answer 3

Others have already rightfully pointed out that this is a weasel. As a member of the Mustelidae family, it is related to the sea otter.

In Maine, these were known as lobsters, which were subsequently driven to extinction by crustaceans now commonly known as lobsters. The last of these old lobsters died in 1980.

_{Pictured: A "furry old lobster"}

Full Disclaimer: The second paragraph of this answer is complete fiction. Any factual resemblance is purely coincidental. Both the old "furry old lobster" and modern-day "lobster" are alive and well.