Month: July 2017

It’ll be awkward to add it on a phone, but a pagination option is currently available on Quora URLs:

Hidden pagination feature. by John Gragson on Bug? or Feature?

It was all the rage in 2010. In fact, I’ve spoken with old time users who said that in 2010, it really did look like the hottest thing out there, and now, not so much.

Pros and cons of infinite scrolling are offered in this article from way back in 2013:

• Smashing Magazine

And inevitably, the venerable Nielsen Usability Voice Of God has weighed in:

• Infinite Scrolling is Not for Every Website

Quora gets away with infinite scrolling because its ranking algorithm bubbles up good enough answers to the top of the page, that it does not get annoying. For most users, in most contexts. But if you’re doing something different, like looking for collapsed answers, or the oldest piece of content, or a chronological search halfway through all your edits ever, infinite scrolling is your enemy. The When Infinite Scrolling Fails section of the first article is a microcosm of Quora; and the article does recommend a hybrid approach.

A hybrid approach you can actually hack yourself: Hidden pagination feature. by John Gragson on Bug? or Feature?

There is a pagination option as a hidden parameter (an Easter Egg, if you will) in the Quora URL:

Hidden pagination feature. by John Gragson on Bug? or Feature?

Huh.

As it turns out, reading Cuckold – Wikipedia, there was an Elizabethan term for someone who was aware of being cuckolded, but cuckold wasn’t it:

One often-overlooked subtlety of the word is that it implies that the husband is deceived, that he is unaware of his wife’s unfaithfulness and may not know until the arrival or growth of a child plainly not his (as with cuckoo birds).

A related word, first appearing in 1520, is wittol, which substitutes wit (in the sense of knowing) for the first part of the word, referring to a man aware of and reconciled to his wife’s infidelity.

Wittol is of course antiquated, and the kink associated with cuckolding (which is all about the partner being aware of the fact) is a pretty recent phenomenon. Wikipedia in fact makes a point of saying that this usage as a fetish is distinct from the traditional use of cuckold.

The Greek for cuckold is κερατάς ‘horned’, and has been since at least Michael Psellos in the 11th century, who documented the term. As OP notes, the Greek expression, like cuckold originally, is unaware of being cheated on; per Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής its secondary meaning is ‘a sucker, someone clueless’. (How the tertiary meaning ‘someone cunning, scoundrel’ comes about is one of those routine oddities of language.)

SLANG.gr (Hi, Melinda!) would be the obvious place to find an expression for something like this in Greek—even if they are expressions made up by site contributors. But I didn’t. The closest I got there was calling someone a Reindeer or Rudolph (τον/την έκανε τάρανδο, ρούντολφ – SLANG.gr) for being repeatedly cuckolded. As in, having really big horns.

Yes.

Hidden pagination feature. by John Gragson on Bug? or Feature?

Grice. Grice Grice Grice Grice Grice.

Paul Grice did seminal work in the philosophy of language, on how we recover meaning from an interlocutor’s words. It is clear that we routinely understand more—or less—than what our interlocutor says. To make sense of this, Grice developed a notion of conversational implicature. This is what we consider to be implicit in what the other is saying; but unlike logical entailment, it is fallible, and defeasible (more information or clarification can establish that our guess was wrong: it works as a default assumption, rather than a universal truth).

We arrive at conversational implicatures, in turn, through assumptions about how conversation works. Grice’s maxims are the ones that get taught in Undergrad Pragmatics, but the underlying Cooperative Principle is what matters here. It is the assumption that the person you are talking with is not a psycho, and that what they are saying somehow makes sense, is relevant to what we’re talking about, and is situated on the same planet as you are. Or, to put it in his terms,

Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

That assumption is what makes irony work, and for that matter what makes humour work. If someone gives you a response that is manifestly untrue and irrelevant, they could be being a psycho. But your assumption under the Cooperative Principle is that they are not being a psycho, that what they have just said is relevant, and that you have to dig a bit deeper to work out what the relevance is. People in fact expect that you will do that digging, which is why a lot of those seemingly psycho irrelevant responses become conventionalised—and the implicature of what they mean becomes a conventional implicature: an implicature that is still not the literal meaning of what is said, but which we by default associate with the expression anyway. (E.g. “sounds legit”.)

What follows from that is that we have strong expectations of what someone should be saying at any point, and of how the world works. And if they say the opposite to what we expect, or of how we know the world works, we assume that they are somehow joking. In fact, humour relies on us assuming that they are somehow joking.

There has been speculation that Indo-European borrowed its words for ‘six’ and ‘seven’ from Semitic, or that they reflect a common ancestral (Nostratic) element. Nostratic is not a mainstream theory, and there has also been significant scepticism about borrowing, especially if the Proto–Indo-European for ‘six’ is closer to *weḱs than *sweḱs.

I’ll note that PIE borrowing numbers from Semitic is not as implausible as it might seem. There is widespread suspicion that PIE borrowed some words from the contemporary prestige languages of the time, Sumerian (isolate: https://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~as…) and Akkadian (https://books.google.com.au/book… ); the words for ‘silver’ and ‘bull’ are the most commonly invoked of the latter. And in a time of early numeracy, borrowing the words for ‘six’ and ‘seven’ is plausible.

See also

• Why the Hebrew Numbers Six and Seven Sound Almost English.
• The etymology of six
• The etymology of seven

Nice question! I believe that they have, though this is kind of speculative.

ASCII and charsets have cemented the notion of a fixed repertoire of characters available to a language or a context. Specialist printers beforehand did have a little wiggleroom in making up characters for specialist purposes–various iterations of sarcasm marks, one-off diacritics or phonetic symbols, and whatever other adhoccery there has been. It cost money, but it was done; so the set of characters was open-ended. There’s less room to do that now, as there is a clearer division in digital media between images and text.

The script this is likely to have the most real impact on is Chinese, which has a (very limited) ability to make up ad hoc new characters.

ASCII and Latin-1 have had contradictory effects on how people thought of letters with diacritics, both of which were unhelpful. Unicode theoretically has solved this; in practice, the damage has been done through legacy.

ASCII (and typewriters before them) often put diacritics out of users’ reach, and they often ended up dropped. So the notion started circulating that diacritics did not matter. Conversely, Latin-1 and its sibling included diacritics and letters as precomposed letters; this circulated the notion that diacritics are not separate from their letters (e.g. e-acute is a single unit)—which is an approach some languages take, but not all. In theory, Unicode decomposes combinations like e-acute into its constituents; but users in data entry are usually not exposed to that, especially for Western European (Latin-1) combinations.

Unicode even more than ASCII, because of its completeness, has promoted the notion of character above that of letter in the way people think of text. People often left out numerals, punctuation, dingbats etc when they thought of what constitutes text (see What is the last letter in the Coptic alphabet?). Being exposed to a character matrix like Unicode makes people much more aware of non-letters. An unholy side-effect of this has been the proliferation of emoji.

With much more limited impact, Unicode has prioritised the notion of character above that of the glyph: it allows that there are contextual variants of characters, but it promoted the platonic ideal of the character over the glyph. We rarely see this in most contexts, especially because the really commonplace contextual variants are encoded as characters anyway (medial and final letters in Greek, Arabic and Hebrew); but ligatures are the most common instance of this (which data entry now realises silently). People are now actually less aware of ligatures than before, precisely because they are now substantially automated; so people don’t need to focus on glyphs as much as they needed to before 2000.

Thanks to the other respondents. Patron saints share with the Ancient Greek gods the notion of domain of influence. They also, significantly, share the notion of patronage: elements of folk religion such as Votive offerings (Greek tamata), and theological notions such as Intercession of saints, are tied up with that understanding of how the Heavens work, as opposed to the Protestant notion of a direct relationship with God.

In Greek folk religion, there are several noticeable instances where a saint has been pressed into service to fill a niche left by a Greek god:

• While in the West Saint Nicholas ended up as Santa Claus, he didn’t in the East (that became St Basil’s job). Instead, St Nicholas became the patron of sailors; per Wikipedia, “In centuries of Greek folklore, Nicholas was seen as “The Lord of the Sea”, often described by modern Greek scholars as a kind of Christianized version of Poseidon.”

Oh dear. Look what else I found on Wikipedia.

The modern city of Demre, Turkey is built near the ruins of the saint’s home town of ancient Myra, and attracts many Russian tourists as St. Nicholas is a very popular Orthodox saint. Restoration of Saint Nicholas’ original church is currently underway, with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2007 permitting Divine Liturgy to be celebrated at the site, and contributing 40,000 Turkish lira to the project.

A solemn bronze statue of the saint by Russian sculptor Gregory Pototsky was donated by the Russian government in 2000, and was given a prominent place in the square fronting the medieval Church of St. Nicholas. In 2005, mayor Süleyman Topçu had the statue replaced by a red-suited plastic Santa Claus statue, because he wanted an image more recognisable to foreign visitors. Protests from the Russian government against this were successful, and the bronze statue was returned (albeit without its original high pedestal) to a corner nearer the church.

There’d be a fair few Orthodox pilgrims rather confused to see a jolly St Basil at St Nicholas’ church.

• St Elias (= Prophet Elijah) often has chapels built on mountain tops, just as temples to the Sun God, Helios, were built on mountain tops. Elias and Helios sound almost the same (/iˈlias/, /ˈilios/), and… well, you tell me:

• Offerings to St Barbara may be a continuation of offerings left to Hecate: Saint Barbara

I’m trying to rationalise the regional subdivisions of Greece; to do that, I’ve created Geographical Regions of Greece. Could a grownup please make this a child of Greece, which is locked?