Category: Uncategorized

I am the first to say that Quora Inc are technically incompenent (in places; I was rather impressed with their recent post on CSS: Faster Paint Times by Michael Yong on Engineering at Quora).

But concretely, look more closely at the all time graph.

See how it starts back at 2013 or whenever? (I’m not checking, coz it’s slow.)

What’s the bet that the all time graph doesn’t start fetching data to plot from when you joined Quora, but from the start of time?

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Oh, and 1.6 million views is modest, is it?

I’ve got 300k.

I hate you.

(Checks profile)

Oh, you’re that anti-anti-smoking dude! In that case, I love you. Coz God knows, you’re not getting a whole lot of love on this forum…

How do I pronounce eta?

In Modern Greek: /i/.

When reading Ancient Greek to myself, still /i/. I’m Greek, which makes me Reuchlinian, as Haggen Kennedy described: I pronounce Ancient Greek as Modern Greek to myself.

When reading Ancient Greek out loud, or describing Ancient Greek historically, I do not use whatever weird-ass Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching they have in these parts. I do what we reasonably think eta originally was: [ɛː].

People loathe the pissing contest between Hitler and Stalin that always arises with these questions, but it’s curiously absent from this thread. So:

Stalin.

Because with Hitler, at least you knew who the enemies were throughout his reign. With Stalin, the enemies changed depending on what side of bed he got up on. If both are evil, I’ll fear evil + unpredictable more than evil + predictable.

No. Australia.

1. McKayla Kennedy is awesome and considered and thoughtful, and I don’t like surfacing disagreements with her, particularly when my response is impulsive and emotive and rash.
2. There are legitimate uses of anonymity even in seemingly innocuous topics. A very cluey poster on Turkic languages goes anon, because he doesn’t want the grief from Turkish nationalists, for example. It is a sliding scale of risk.
3. But, in topics and contexts where a Reasonable Person would not see the point of anonymity, and in a Quora where, as Laura Hale diagnosed, there’s between 30 and 50% of all questions being asked anonymously—

—yes, I do think it says something. It says that people don’t want their eponymous identity associated with what they post online, not because it’s particularly risky, but because that’s their intrinsic sense of privacy. It’s the people who don’t want to submit to the Real Name policy, and use anonymity instead of the now unavailable pseudonymity.

If you’re not judgemental, it still says about them that they don’t want to be publicly accountable for their contributions to Quora. If you’re judgemental like me, it says that they are not part of my tribe: they are not people who engage on the site in the same way I do.

McKayla, you posted a hierarchy of Quora users: McKayla Kennedy’s answer to How is Quora stratified below the Top Writer level? I’m delighted to quote you:

Anonymouses—frankly, they don’t rank on the scale at all because none of their answers are connectable. They are like ghosts, some good spirits and some bad, but necessary nonetheless. Collectively, they are viewed with vague distrust.

In fact, you remind me of the Greek fairy tale depictions of fairies or Africans: sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent, but always alien.

There’s a couple of lists out there of ASCII approximations of Unicode punctuation, including:

• Lexical Tools
• https://lexsrv3.nlm.nih.gov/LexS…
• Replacing unicode punctuation with ASCII approximations

None of them include (C) and (R), irritatingly.

If you want ASCII approximations of other scripts, you’re getting into ASCII Romanisations, such as Greeklish, Fingilish, 3arabizi, etc.; see Category:Romanization by script

Latin would help more. And it’s a bit of a sledgehammer to adopt with your English vocab: you certainly don’t need all the Greek grammar that goes with learning Greek. It helps in scholarly vocabulary, but Greek is no longer a very productive source of new coinages; it would be more helpful just to familiarise yourself with particular technical vocabularies, where you’ll see the same Greek roots recurring.

There’s several perspectives one can take on the whole sorry-ass saga of niggardly, on which as always see Controversies about the word “niggardly”.

There’s the perspective of the linguist, the language-lover, the activist, and the anti-American.

The Anti-American first, so I can get it off my chest:

Christ, I’m glad I don’t live in your country.

Australia has a bad history with its Indigenous people, with the Melanesians it colonised, and now with the Somali refugees who are the latest marauding evil criminal youth gangs (it was the Vietnamese 20 years ago). But…

Christ, I’m glad I don’t live in your country.

More on that later.

The linguist:

If a critical mass of people within a language community think the word is unacceptable, well, then it’s unacceptable. Enough people here and in related threads have indicated that it is.

It doesn’t mean they’re etymologically right; but etymology is only one factor in how words work. There’s any number of connotations words acquire without being informed by etymology: language is a synchronic system, and connotations works synchronically.

Of course, my fellow personas Anti-American and Language-Lover don’t particularly feel they’re in the same language community as the people who object to niggardly, or even the same planet. But that’s not how it works. The word’s become a trigger for a critical mass of people, and is resulting in people reporting comments on Quora: Why would one of my comments be reported because I used the word niggardly?

Back to the Anti-American:

FFS, I don’t live in your God-forsaken country; do I have to put up with your “Is X random ethnicity white” and “niggardly is a bad word” bizarre racial obsessions here too?

The linguist:

Yes. Yes you do.

Well, not the former one. But yes, because you’re still part of the same language community.

The language-lover:

Niggardly is a useful word. And it’s useful because of its added connotations: it says things that miserly doesn’t. In particular, it (probably) comes from the same Scandinavian word as niggling does, and it has the connotations of niggling that miserly does not: pedantic, fussing over details, penny-pinching.

The linguist:

Yeah. But connotations work both ways. And now it has the added connotations of “that word that that guy in DC got fired over”, and “that word that sounds like nigger”. Because connotations work synchronically and not just etymologically.

The Anti-American:

In fricking America it does. And not to all Americans either, just a vocal minority of whingers.

The linguist:

And you’re still stuck in the same language community as them.

Note also that the negative connotations have taken over, because niggardly was not a common word to begin with.

The activist:

…

The Anti-American:

Nick, pull the other one mate. You’re not an activist.

The observer of activism:

I note with interest the initial reaction of the late Julian Bond, head of the NAACP at the time, to the Ground Zero incident in 1999, where the guy was fired: (Controversies about the word “niggardly”)

Julian Bond, then chairman of the NAACP, deplored the offense that had been taken at Howard’s use of the word. “You hate to think you have to censor your language to meet other people’s lack of understanding”, he said. “David Howard should not have quit. Mayor Williams should bring him back—and order dictionaries issued to all staff who need them.”

Bond also said, “Seems to me the mayor has been niggardly in his judgment on the issue” and that as a nation the US has a “hair-trigger sensibility” on race that can be tripped by both real and false grievances.

Now I like what Bond said for a couple of reasons. One, because I’m a libertarian in matters of free speech—more so than is usual in contemporary Australia. In fact, you might even say…

The Anti-American:

Don’t! Don’t do it! Don’t say anything good about America EVERRRR!

The observer of activism:

Two, because politically, I don’t think you win the battle of ideas by censorship, or by being seen as hypersensitive (“false grievances”): you win the battle of ideas by argument, not by distractions.

The language-lover:

Three, because Bond liked dictionaries. In fact, he thought all staff should have them.

The Anti-American:

Yeah. Sounds like Bond was a great American, and displayed many of the virtues some people grudgingly admire about Seppoland. (Not me of course.)

The linguist:

Australian English Seppoland < Seppo < Septic tank < Rhyming slang for Yank < Yankee < Dutch Janke < Jan < Latin Ioannes < Hebrew Yohanan.

The language-lover:

Language. It’s a beautiful thing.

The Anti-American:

Christ, I’m glad I don’t live in your country.

Inb4 “If you want Reddit, you know where to find it”.

I am more of a libertarian than many of my fellows. (At least, many of my fellows that I feel political alignment to.) I loathe how BNBR is applied as a chilling effect (mostly by incompetent execution as lack of transparency, and complete lack of nuance). I delight in drawing cartoons of executioner Quorabots. I am, as my tag says, a Scott Welch-ite about Quora—except that Scott is much more enthusiastic about BNBR, and I just grudgingly accept it.

… and all that said: Quora Dark would be really popular with question askers. Question answerers would not want any part of it. Not to mention that Quora Inc would not want its brand tainted by association. You’re talking about the company that allows discussion of porn, and then makes sure as few people as possible see it.

That’s a very open question, and I’m going to take the easy way out:

Jakobson’s functions of language

1. The Referential Function

corresponds to the factor of Context and describes a situation, object or mental state. The descriptive statements of the referential function can consist of both definite descriptions and deictic words, e.g. “The autumn leaves have all fallen now.”

2. The Poetic Function

focuses on “the message for its own sake” (the code itself, and how it is used) and is the operative function in poetry as well as slogans.

3. The Emotive (alternatively called “Expressive” or “Affective”) Function

relates to the Addresser (sender) and is best exemplified by interjections and other sound changes that do not alter the denotative meaning of an utterance but do add information about the Addresser’s (speaker’s) internal state, e.g. “Wow, what a view!”

4. The Conative Function

engages the Addressee (receiver) directly and is best illustrated by vocatives and imperatives, e.g. “Tom! Come inside and eat!”

5. The Phatic Function

is language for the sake of interaction and is therefore associated with the Contact/Channel factor. The Phatic Function can be observed in greetings and casual discussions of the weather, particularly with strangers. It also provides the keys to open, maintain, verify or close the communication channel: “Hello?”, “Ok?”, “Hummm”, “Bye”…

6. The Metalingual (alternatively called “Metalinguistic” or “Reflexive”) Function

is the use of language (what Jakobson calls “Code”) to discuss or describe itself.

“Language is used for communication” is what people default to thinking; that’s the referential function (what is in the world), the emotive function (how I feel about the world), and the conative function (how I want to change the world). And the metalingual function, if you’re talking to linguists.

The other two functions, the poetic and phatic, are not primarily about communication. Or at least, not just about communication.