There are alternatives to Quora, particularly if you’re more interested in the social component than the Q&A component. I’m not saying they’re good alternatives, but they do exist.
My escape plan involves paying closer attention to both Reddit, and Stack Exchange.
Why are so many questions that don’t need improvement marked as needing improvement?
Pretty much the same question. I’ve gotten some real headscratchers too. Seems clear to me the bot has changed, though the questions I’ve had dinged were dinged with a delay of weeks.
I’m OP, and the question isn’t mine. The question in details is my third cousin’s, Manny Sfendourakis’. Let me explain his question, and then go to the more general answer.
The Nicene Creed refers to the Christian Church as “one holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church”. Catholic back then meant just Universal. Of course, you call the Church Universal only when people start disputing that it is Universal: the phrase was added in the First Council of Constantinople, in 381, as part of the pushback against Arianism. Its association with the Catholic Church is much later.
Church cantors in Greek Orthodox churches in Australia have been reciting the Creed in English for some years now. As you can well imagine, Catholic sticks in their craw. In Greek, there’s not much they can do about it: Εἰς μίαν, ἁγίαν, καθολικὴν καὶ ἀποστολικὴν Ἐκκλησίαν.
They could have done something about it in the 17th century, when the Roman Catholics were called katólikos (from Italian catolico). But it’s more important now that Greeks use ancient-looking words, even if that does mean that Greeks end up calling the Catholics the Universal Church. So kaθolikós it is, for both meanings.
In Australia, though, some cantors have decided they can do something about it. When they read the Creed out in English, they call it One Holy Cathólic and Apostólic Church. And they defend this as the true pronunciation.
Manny has a third cousin who’s a linguist, so he thought he’d ask…
Both Latin and Greek have adjectives ending in –icus / –ikos. Adjectives ending in –ikos in Greek came into English via Latin; so the accent of katholikós in Greek is irrelevant. Besides, the accent of katholikós is on a syllable that isnʼt even there in English: catholic[os].
So what matters is what the accent is in Latin. And the accent in Latin is on the antepenult (third last syllable): geográphicus, mathemáticus, comédicus. The accent in words English took from Latin, during the great influx of the Renaissance, followed suit: geográphic, mathemátics, comédic.
So… cathólic, right?
No.
The Renaissance was not the only time that Latin adjectives ending in –icus came into English. A few such adjectives came into English rather earlier, in Middle English. And when they did, they came via French.
Now, Middle French was not the Pepe le Pew language it is now. Not as many nasals, not as many silent vowels, not as many, I dunno, French things about it.
But it did already have one Pepe le Pew characteristic. All its words were already accented on the final syllable.
C’est magnifíque, non?
Alors, on étude la rhetorIque, et l’arismetIque, et on n’est pas un heretIque, que serait une chose lunatIque, comme si on boit du arsenIque. Mais non, on est un bon catholIque.
And like all French words in Middle English, those French words were originally accented Pepe le Pew style, on their final syllable, with a secondary (weaker) accent on the antepenult.
Rhètoríke, àrsmetíke, hèretíke, lùnatíke, àrseníke, càtholíke.
But English didn’t particularly like sounding all Pepe le Pew. So eventually, the secondary accent became the primary accent:
Rhétorick, ársmetick, héretick, lúnatick, ársenick, cátholick.
Arsmetick? Oh yeah. Once the Renaissance happened, they realised they were missing a -th- in the word. So aríthmetic. But the word was still accented the un-French way, rather than being updated to be accented like Latin.
So, if a word ending in -ic is accented on the antepenult, then it came in during Middle English, via French. If it is accented on the penult, it came in during Early Modern English, straight from Latin.
In fact, you can have the one word split up two ways. Arithmetic is accented like it came from French. An arithmétic mean, on the other hand, is accented like it came straight from Latin. The adjectival meaning of arithmétic is a more recent coinage. And of course, it is subject to analogy with other adjectives, such as geométric or logaríthmic mean.
So, if England in the Renaissance was full of people that “one holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church” stuck in their craw, it could have happened that the old un-French accent would have been retained (fittingly) for the Roman Catholic church, and the new Latin accent Cathólic would be fit to the more learnèd meaning of Universal.
But that didn’t happen. Because, well, because random, and because precedent. The only people I know of that say Cathólic are Greek cantors. It hasn’t happened, and there isn’t the precedent for it now, and there’s not enough Greek cantors in the English-speaking world to establish precedent.
I unplugged myself in disgust a few days ago, after Sierra Spaulding felt she had to unplug herself. Right after the trifecta of Habib Fanny being unplugged, Jeremy Markeith Thompson being unplugged WHILE he’d unplugged himself, and Michael Masiello being unplugged. It was too much at once for me to ignore.
I kept peeking in while I was out, because I’m too severely addicted. This is actually not a good thing, and I’m going to work on ways to reduce the amount of time I spend here; I do have other shit to be doing. I’ve had a chat to Sierra, I’ve calmed down somewhat, I realised that if I kept peeking in, I wasn’t really unplugging, so, fine. I’m back. Kinda.
I hope that Sierra, and Habib, and Jeremy, and Michael, and all the others whose voices I have come to appreciate, stay. But more than that, I hope that they are validated by their stay.
And more than that still, I hope they stay safe. If staying safe means they disable comments, or leave Quora and find a worthier space for them, then let them care for themselves more than they care for a bunch of people on the Internet.
Quora has been even less the same for me this past month, as the two voices I have come to cherish the most here, Michael Masiello’s and Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s, have been stilled—Dimitra because she actually has stuff in real life to deal with, Michael because he was shut down, and so were his friends.
To be brutal, having my friends out of my feed has allowed me to connect with new voices; the feed is harsh like that. But it hasn’t felt the same for me. I mean no insult to those I’ve started following the past month; there’s a reason I have, and I look forward to getting to know them even better. But it feels hollower for me here.
Other than that, the fight continues. I continue to hold the Mods of Quora, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral, in contempt—once again, not for any scuffle I’ve had (yet): but for my friends, for those of my tribe. Those who say Quora’s BNBR is working, I’ll say it now openly, I have no traffic with: they are not of my tribe.
Quora’s implementation of BNBR isn’t working. People are being hurt. They are being hurt by simultaneously robotic and sluggish applications of the rules, that punish the innocent and ignore the guilty (until bad publicity intervenes).
In Real Life, the Law is pretty damn sluggish as well; but it is not administered by Machine Learning bots and third party contractors and some corporate complaints inbox. It is administered by juries and judges, who are meant to understand not just the letter of the Law, but its spirit. Not just the infractions, but the context. Not just the penalty, but the greater good. And those juries and judges are subject to transparency and review, not corporate silence and deflection.
Yeah, yeah, Quora is a private company, and here at Quora our mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge, and if you don’t like the rules there’s the door, and whatever happened to Charlie Cheever, and blah blah blah.
Well done, Quora Inc. Let me know when you take over from Google and Wikipedia. And when you’re planning to monetise what, while you’re at it.
But spare me the claims that this is a safe space, and BNBR made it so. Don’t piss on my shoes and tell me it’s raining. With you, Quora Inc, I have no traffic. My traffic is with the Quorans.
Thank you to my friends who have wished me well: La Gigi and Magister Michael and Z-Kat and Khateeb. Thank you to the usual suspects who upvoted me while I was away, because they agreed, or because they are my friends. Thank you to those who have entertained me, and to those I have learned from, and to those I may have even taught a factoid.
And thank you to my Quora Master Scott, for helping the scales fall from my eyes.
I’ll be scarcer here, at least for a while: I do after all need to cut down on the addiction. I’ll stick around while I can bear to. Wiser, and sadder.
For that, at least, I do thank Quora Inc.
The fight continues.
I am enraged.
Yes, some trolls get banned, some of the time. Yes, there’s an inordinate number of users to monitor. Though then again, noone told Quora to abandon community moderation.
Meanwhile, we have posters on this very thread defend the robotic application of rules, that putatively are meant to encourage a civil environment.
And all that blocking has led to a safe and comfortable space, has it?
Don’t piss on my shoes and tell me it’s raining. This. is. not. working.
And have we noticed how quiet it’s been on Rage against Quora lately?
We have an expression in Greek. Με πνίγει το δίκιο. Justice is choking me. One’s sense of justice, frustrated, stymied.
I’m deactivating my account, until I’m numbed to my sense of Justice again.
EDIT: An illustration, if you will, of the principles at work.
(Hic explicit sermo = Here endeth the lesson.)
The drones are from Jeremy Markeith Thompson’s answer to Why are so many Black Quorans deactivating their accounts? It’s how the cumulative microaggressions have made him feel. The drones are of course buzzing “N*g n*g n*g”, for plausible deniability.
What’s that? Why yes. That question has indeed been deleted.
Federation Square. Opened at the centenary of Australian Federation, in 2001. Strange, po-mo, mixed-use space in the very navel of the world, as far as any Melburnian is concerned: the four corners of the intersection of Swanston and Flinders St—
As Melbourne a navel of the earth as you can get:
Fed Square is a locale with eateries, uneven walkways, open spaces, museums, and a performance area.
And very very big screens, which help make it a default destination for people during major sporting events. Particularly World Cup soccer, but as depicted below, more genteel watching of tennis, too.
When it was built, I was a young lecturer, and Fed Square had opened up. It’s where my students would disappear to at lunchtime. I sneered, like many a Melburnian sneered, at its po-mo unevenness and ramps, and its Meccano buildings. I’m not convinced to this day that people love the architecture. But they do love hanging out around it.
Before there was Fed Square, those were dark days, when Swanston St was open to traffic, and there was a Hook turn for motorists onto Flinders St—a manoeuvre commemorated in the TISM song Get thee in my behind, Satan:
In those dark days, the site of this Square was occupied by the utterly unlamented Princes Gate Towers, headquarters of the Gas & Fuel Corporation of Victoria.
The site is at the navel of Melbourne, flanked by the gothic loveliness of the Cathedral, the rotund majesty of Flinders St Station, and the shabby comeliness of Young & Jacksons. And what did Melbourne put there in 1967?
Well, what was in fashion architecturally in 1967?
The monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey was filmed in ’68. Coincidence? I think not!
Wikipedia, what say you?
The towers were appreciated by some as modernist architectural icons.
Yeah. Screw those guys.
However, many Melbourne residents regarded the towers as eyesores and criticised their size and placement.
Ya think?
The towers were considered to have cut the city off from the river and also detracted from Saint Paul’s Cathedral and the heritage facades along Flinders Street. The towers were much larger than any of the surrounding buildings and were said to have dominated the surrounding context.
Were said?!
What part of
do you not understand, Wikipedia?!
An Australian Women’s Weekly article from 1969 expresses the general public sentiment towards the towers at the time:
“Once the Graceful spires of St. Paul’s Cathedral dominated the southern entry to Melbourne. In 1967, the ultra modern twin towers of the Princes Gate complex raised their lean, unornamented 17 storeys to rob strollers on the banks of the Yarra of their traditional view.”
Well, suffice it to say that when the Gas & Fuel Corp was privatised in 1996, those twin towers did not look ultra-modern or lean. They looked like bulldozer bait. And that’s what they were.
modernist architectural icons
F*ck you too.
Thanks to Robert Charles Lee for his answer.
The one grammatical difference I’ve noticed is that British English allows do next to auxiliary verbs as a pro-verb; Australian English does not. So Did you ever see the Pope? can be answered I haven’t done in British, but only I haven’t in Australian.
Irish, especially before the mid-20th century spelling reforms, quite possibly; its marking of slender vs broad consonants is still pretty baroque even now. It led to the following comment on the Lojban mailing list in 1993 by And Rosta:
“Some of the English might say that the Irish orthography is very Irish. Personally, I have a lot of respect for a people who can create something so grotesque.”
Oh, and that’s with reference to the new spelling.
The old spelling was an accretion of dialects and obsolete pronunciations, on top of the lenitions and palatalisations and mutations of Celtic, that led to entertainments like this:
old spelling new spelling
beirbhiughadh — beiriú
imthighthe — imithe
faghbháil — fáil
urradhas — urrús
filidheacht — filíocht
Even if pronunciation was recoverable from the spelling (which I’m not sure about), teaching that many silent letters is just looney tunes.
From Wikipedia, the spelling reform process was messy, controversial, and what prevailed was the work of civil servants (the parliamentary translation service), who had less compunctions than the linguists about what might be put into practice.
And yes, the standardisation of Irish did run roughshod over dialect, which was inevitable. The survival of Ulster Irish does not owe a debt of gratitude to Standard Irish.
No, btw, the fact that Irish spelling reform succeeded does not mean that the Irish are an inherently superior people to the “Anglo-Saxons”. It’s far easier to do spelling reform on a moribund language, when the second-language learners are running the standardisation, and the native dialect speakers barely write anything. American English is not Ulster Irish. And it’s unlikely to see the UK Parliament and the US Congress get into spelling regulation in my lifetime…
Mention by @-citation of my name inside a comment was working in generating notifications for me, until mid October 2016.
It’s not working for me currently; interested in hearing of others’ experience.
As is often the case in Quora, hard to tell if the new state of affairs is meant to be a bug or a feature.