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.
—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:
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.
I can tell why the question was posed, which amuses me.
Clearly Quora is a Social Media site: there is interaction between members of the kind we recognise from Social Media. And clearly all respondents so far have said “duh, of course it is.”
But that was not the intent of The Founders. The Founders wanted a serious Expert forum, Enhancing the World’s Knowledge, and Able to Serve as a Substitute for Google and/or Wikipedia.
To The Founders, any of this socialising crap has been a distraction. If you wanted socialising, you know where to find Facebook. In fact, they know where to find Facebook, since that’s where they came from.
That’s why the Top Writer cabals are set up on Facebook, not here. That’s why the social media functionality on Quora is rudimentary. That’s why The Founders, if they had their way, would have done away with comments, and with the unwashed masses contributing.
(Because that worked out so well with Citizendium.)
(OK, that’s an unfair comparison; Quora weren’t seeking out academics as experts at the start: they were the experts themselves. Which is why in 2010, Quora was Silicon Valley and Startups, 24/7.)
The stated intent of The Founders was that it not be a Socialising site, and Quorans who agree with the Founders’ agenda take a dim view of “The Other Quora” (Indians using Quora much more like a Social Media site). The downgrading of comments (deletable, not sharable, not searchable) and Blogs (not googlable, hidden as a misfeature) are also consistent with this orientation.
The Earth however does continue to move. Eppur si muove.
I’m with Jeff Wright. I find much about the way Quora is run pig-headed; but some topics are a lot better than no topics, and it’s much easier to tag topics if you’re given a starting point.
OTOH, I don’t have much confidence in how users are involved in any feedback loop, and some of the errors are quite obvious. More emphasis on topic confirmation for new users would be a good thing too; but that would run afoul of Quora’s longstanding policy of zero onboarding.
You lose linguistic diversity, as the dialects gradually die out, or at least are marginalised. You may not may not care about linguistic diversity, of course.
You lose ways of saying things that are specific to non-standard dialects. Cretan dialect for example has a distinct word for “trickle”. (To my annoyance, I don’t remember it.) Standard Greek only has “run”, a verb which applies equally to dripping, trickling, and leaking. Pontic Greek works on animacy, not gender. Tsakonian has some very archaic usage of the participle, which end up sounding closer to English than Modern Greek (he started barking αρχίνιε κχαούντα; I am seeing έννι ορού).
You lose the cultural associations that the dialects expressed; you sacrifice the distinct cultures conveyed by the dialects in favour of the standard.
If your language is moribund and there are still native speakers, standardising languages turns out not to be a good idea. Oh sure, you have limited resources to promulgate the language, and they’re more efficiently expended through using only one standard form. But when the standard form is not what the native speakers of the language actually speak, all you’ve ended up doing is alienating those speakers from the media you use. That’s what happened with Gaelic for example: the remaining speakers out in the Hebrides felt even worse about the language they spoke, because it didn’t match what BBC Alba was broadcasting.
If the standard is not anyone’s native dialect, you’re going to have some disruption while people learn the new standard, and get used to it. In fact, if the standard is not preexisting, you’re going to have some disruption while people flesh it out and elaborate it. And they may do a bad job of it.
If the standard is someone’s native dialect, you’re going to have enduring resentment from speakers of the dialects which have missed out.
If you’re a subject matter expert, you know which topics to remove.
If you’re not, you could (a) report the question, and hope that QCR will work out what’s wrong, act as subject matter experts themselves, and pick the right subset of questions, with the longstanding level of expertise and discretion we have come to expect…
… no, stop laughing, Steven…
… no, seriously…
or (b) I dunno, find a subject matter who can.
Robert Frost complained about something quite similar recently, in light of Quora’s decision to do away with complex reporting: What do we do about wrong answers? by Robert Frost on Rage against Quora