Trump Hasn’t Killed Comedy. He’s Killed Our Stupid Idea of Comedy.

The thing about “Ooh! Look at us! We’re such taboo-breakers!”, as Michaelis Maus will tell you, is that “Radical” is the new Conservative: it’s breaking obsolete taboos that not many people are fussed about anymore, and it’s not breaking the actual current taboos that matter. And patting itself on the back for it.

The alt-right are vile? Why yes. Historically, when you violate a taboo, that makes you vile! Taboos are there for a reason.

Money quote:

Comedy, evidently, is neither necessarily moral nor inevitably liberal. Andrew Anglin, a neo-Nazi blogger, has linked trolling to “culture jamming,” a late 20th-century wave of anti-consumerist media pranks. Mark Dery, who introduced the term to the mainstream with a 1990 essay in the New York Times, replied in a 2016 interview that Anglin’s tactics are actually a “bastardized form of cultural jamming” because they “discredit the official narrative” and “suggest a false equivalency between viewpoints and positions where there truly is a right and a wrong.” Never mind that the whole point of culture jamming was to discredit the official narrative: Anglin’s culture jamming must be wrong because it targets the wrong people. This is like saying that a gun is not a real gun because it was used in a homicide.

Which is not to suggest that racist trolling, like murder, is ever justified—just that it’s still a species of humor. A bad joke is a joke, just as Der Ewige Jude is a movie. Trolling, culture jamming, and deceit may currently be the comic armaments of people you don’t like, but it hasn’t always been this way. (Remember: “We called them lies.”) And comedy’s survival may depend on it not being so again.

A good question, and I hope to hear more stories from others.

Hamartia is about viewing your life as an Aristotelean tragedy. So,

The Decalogue of Nick #2: I’ve trained as a linguist, and I have done computational linguistics stuff by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile

Scratch me just a little bit, and I will lament the defining woe of my life, that I did not become a professional linguist: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your personal experience with obtaining a linguistics degree?

And the fatal flaw of the hero in Ancient Greek tragedy is more often than not hubris, arrogance.

Well, here’s the arrogance part:

• Where did you hope the degree will take you? To being a tenured academic, lecturing with adoring audiences at my feet, writing 20 papers a year, and living the dream.

But more insightful is this answer: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are your 3 worst mistakes? Would you fix any of them if you could go back in time?

And, perhaps most critically, I wasn’t prepared to leave Australia and spend the rest of my life hunting for the next tenure-track gig, like some modern day wandering minstrel. I knew myself—not just what I’d been brainwashed to be: what I actually was. I needed to lay down roots. I needed a sense of place.

[…] That Cavafy poem? He titled it Che fece… il gran rifiuto.

He left out two critical words in the Dante verse he was quoting. Che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto. He who made the grand refusal—through cowardice.

Was I a coward? Yeah. But I was also being me.

My hamartia was not so much arrogance, in the end, as fear of instability.

In Greek, pipa “smoking pipe” (cf. Blandine Meyrieux-Lefevre’s answer for French), or tsimbouki “hookah pipe” < Turkish çubuk.

That was a Google Image search for “hookah pipe”. Let’s just say that doing a Google Image search in a public place for τσιμπούκι was a mistake…

As τσιμπούκι – SLANG.gr informs me (Hi, Melinda!), the Turkish çubuk has not picked up that connotation. The Turkish equivalent is boru ‘pipe’ or saksafon.

tsimbouki has also picked up the secondary meaning of ‘extremely difficult’; Προσπαθώ να λύσω μια άσκηση αλλά είναι πολύ τσιμπούκι “I’m trying to solve this exercise, but it’s very blowjob”. πίπα – SLANG.gr reports for pipa the secondary meanings ‘nonsense; fiasco; something of low quality’.

Linguistic sexism. It really blows…

Other terms reported over at slang.gr: κλαρίνο – SLANG.gr “clarinet” (Northern Greek, usually with reference to losing soccer teams); Wiktionary adds γλειφιτζούρι “lollipop”.

Originally Answered:

Why aren’t trending topics appearing in Quora now?

Changes to Trending Topics by Abhinav Sharma on Quora Product Updates

Inspired by the last post, I thought I’d go through the last year’s worth of posts on Quora Product Updates, and check on their longevity.

• A New Answer Tab by Sherwin Wu on Quora Product Updates (2016–07–28). Still there.
• Improving the Reporting Experience by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2016–07–30). Since retracted.
• Elimination of Topic-Based Moderation by Jay Wacker on Quora Product Updates (2016–08–20). Retraction.
• Testing Changes to Adding Questions Anonymously by Riley Patterson on Quora Product Updates (2016–08–27). Test announcement.
• Answer Footer Policy Announcement by Jay Wacker on Quora Product Updates (2016–08–31). Policy announcement. Still applies, we think.
• Easier access to ‘Edit Answer’ and ‘Suggest Edits’ by Michael Ran Chen on Quora Product Updates (2016–09–08). Still there, although it briefly went missing.
• Announcing the New Policy on Question Topics by Jay Wacker on Quora Product Updates (2016–09–17). Policy announcement. Still applies, we think.
• New Comment Controls for Writers by Vanessa Tan on Quora Product Updates (2016–09–21). Still there.
• A New Way to See Answers from People You Follow by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2016–09–29). Since retracted.
• Removing Endorsements by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates (2016–10–29). Retraction.
• Improving Reading and Writing from Feeds by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2016–11–22). Some of this I think has been retracted, i.e. the greying out.
• Show your expertise with credentials by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Product Updates (2016–12–06). Still there.
• Improving Anonymity at Quora by Riley Patterson on Quora Product Updates (2017–01–14). Announcement.
• Official Quora Chrome Extension Update: Ask Questions Easily by Sumi Kim on Quora Product Updates (2017–01–24). Presumably still there.
• Improving Bug Reporting on Mobile by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2017–01–27). I assume still there.
• Featured Comments by Kelvin Ho on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–02). Superseded two months later (with several months of random alternation).
• Upcoming Changes to Anonymity on Quora by Riley Patterson on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–10). Still there.
• Change to Most Viewed Writer by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–14). Retraction.
• Changes to Trending Topics by Abhinav Sharma on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–18). Retraction.
• Helping Writers Get the Perfect Question by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–28). Still there.
• Introducing Embedded Tweets by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2017–03–03). Still there.
• More Visibility for High-Quality Comments by Diana Gerr on Quora Product Updates (2017–03–31). Still there.
• Highlighting Connections Across Quora by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Product Updates (2017–04–26). Since retracted.
• Removing Knowledge Prizes by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates (2017–04–28). Retraction.
• New Question Asking Experience on Mobile by Henry Modisett on Quora Product Updates (2017–05–03). Still there.
• Video on Quora by Tommy MacWilliam on Quora Product Updates (2017–05–16). Still there, I assume.

So: in one year,

• 26 posts.
• 4 are announcements.
• 12 are for features that are still in place.
• 6 are withdrawals of features.
• 4 are features that were since withdrawn, or superseded. (None reported explicitly.)

• Highlighting Connections Across Quora by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Product Updates (April 26, 2017)
• What do you think of Quora’s elimination of the timeline for answers? (July 25, 2017)

Not that I actually know much about Homeric Greek, but the infinitive does work better than the imperative, because it makes it less personal and more gnomic: it is a statement to the world, not a command to the individual. Although in context, it is not a command anyway, but reported speech:

Ever to Excel – Wikipedia

“Hippolochus begat me. I claim to be his son, and he sent me to Troy with strict instructions: Ever to excel, to do better than others, and to bring glory to your forebears, who indeed were very great … This is my ancestry; this is the blood I am proud to inherit.”

So grabbing Homer’s “ever to excel”, and changing “excel” to “ascend” in the infinitive, would be a good thing. Although I’d go with an antick Homeric infinitive, so αἰὲν ἀναβαίμεναι, rather than ἀναβαίνειν.

But you want to be careful that “ascend” in Greek has the same connotations as “excelsior”. Looking at LSJ, I’m seeing ἀναβαίνω have meanings like “go up to heaven”, “trample on the dead”, and “go on board a ship”; we can pass by “go on a podium to make a speech” as Attic, and “get on top of” for sexual purposes as… well, you know, I don’t know if we can rule that one out. 🙂

I’d look for a verb that’s less ambiguous, and more explicitly about excelling. Citius altius fortius doesn’t include amplius “further”, but I’m thinking ὑπερβάλλω: yes, in Modern Greek that only means “to exaggerate”, but in Ancient Greek its primary meaning is “to shoot beyond [the target]”, and thus “to excel”, “to surpass”. So αἰὲν ὑπερβαλέειν “always to overshoot”. For some extra archaism, make like Germanic and do tmesis: ὑπὲρ αἰὲν βαλέειν “always to shoot over”.

Clearly so. For example:

Do Want / Do Not Want

One might argue that the phonological inventory of Gothic is a spectacularly bad match for that of Modern English. But then again, so was the phonological inventory of Latin.

I think you can, so long as you hold your nose and write vowels as a one to one match with Modern English; you’re not really going to get anything sensible otherwise.

• /f/ and /v/ aren’t differentiated, and they weren’t differentiated in Old English either; we could write <v> as <f>, or <u> or <w> or as <90> (which is a spare letter).
• No <tʃ> (our <ch>), and not much of a soft <c> either. We can press the <x> character into service for one or both.
• No /dʒ/ (our <j>; the Gothic <j> is our <y>). We could give up and make <j> ambiguous between /dʒ/ and /j/, or we could write /w/ as <ƕ> (wh), reuse <w/y> for /j/, and move <j> to /dʒ/. Yuck.
• No /ð/, but that’s ok, <th> is already ambiguous within English.
• No /ʃ/, just as there isn’t one as a letter in English (<sh>). I guess we won’t avoid h-digraphs after all.

… So, yeah, you *could* write English with the Gothic alphabet, but it would be quite awkward in places, and it would not do English justice. Where there’s a will there’s a way, I guess, but it would certainly not be child’s play. Every sentence would have some lack.

Or, to put that last paragraph in Gothic:

… so, jeah, jou kould write english wiþ þe goþik alfabet, but it would be qite awqard in plases, and it would not do english jhustise. ƕere þeres a will þeres a waj, i guess, but it would sertainli not be xilds plaj. eweri sentense would hawe some lakk.

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I don’t know that you’ll find many cultures that think getting blotto is a wonderful thing, but Greek traditional culture is one of many that tut-tuts public drunkenness. The maxim my father used to warn me with was, να το πίνεις [το κρασί], να μη σε πίνει: “You should drink it [wine], you shouldn’t let it drink you.”

(“In Soviet Russia” joke opportunities ignored.)

Greek drinking culture is accompanied by nibbles (mezze), expressly so as to avert quick inebriation—especially if brandy (ouzo, raki) rather than wine is involved. Wine, for that matter, features at the dinner table rather than in the mezze joint. There is a word for drinking without nibbles: xerosfyri, “dry hammer”; the etymology may in fact be “dry + whistling” or a corruption of “dry + sieved”. There is a word for it, precisely because it is looked down upon. Indeed, British drinking culture, with its drinking xerosfyri, was an easy target of criticism for my aunts and uncles in Greece. (Their children of course were already going to bars and knocking back whisky anyway.)

Accompanying this, Greek slang has about as many words for being drunk as Eskimo is alleged to have for snow: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some slang phrases to describe getting drunk in your language or country?