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A2A by Abigail (Abbey) Beach. See, Liana? I’m not ignoring your A2As; it just takes me a while to get through them.

By the time I met PROF Anne FREADMAN,

I was the departmental IT guy, setting up Macs, and misquoting Peirce to her, a Peirce specialist.

She certainly did not owe me any academic mentoring.

Yet bless her, she did. And one of the pieces of academic mentoring she offered me was how to get me motivated to write academic papers.

Just read what other people have written. You’re eventually going to be so annoyed with how bad everyone else’s work is, you’ll want to write your own.

…

No, esteemed fellow Quorans! I am not saying that if I answer a question you have already answered, it is because what you’ve written is crap!

…

… at least, not always. 🙂

But yes, realising that other people do not have the last word on something, realising that you have something to add to the conversation; being, in fact, part of a conversation. That is a powerful motivator.

That’s what you get here.

You know what is not a powerful motivator? Just having something to say, if it’s outside of a conversation. I wrote a fair few academic papers. They were pretty niche, the only people that might care to read them were in Greece, and I wasn’t over there.

There wasn’t really a conversation: I was shooting out papers, and never heard anything back. After a few years, I stopped writing papers.

Refer to Nick Nicholas’ answer to After “Quora auf Deutsch” what is the next language Quora will target? for the summary of the Lohr /Nicholas/Stefani deliberations on Quora internationalisation.

Quora will launch a non-Latin script version of the site when it fits their commercial imperatives. D’Angelo is already on record that he will give Chinese a miss, because of the impenetrability of the Chinese market (Quora raises $85 million to expand internationally and develop its ads business). Similar constraints may well apply to Russian, and to Japanese. Islamophobia among VCs may get in the way of Arabic. As already noted in Heidi Cool’s answer, the high level of English literacy in India precludes Hindi.

It’s a tossup between Russian, Japanese, and Arabic, and I suspect Portuguese will get implemented before any of them.

Refer What are other question-asking websites like Quora?

Branko Jovanovic’s answer cites Yahoo Answers and Reddit as the more informal alternatives; the more formal alternative is Stack Exchange. The Stack Exchange family of sites started with Stack Overflow, where it has the monopoly as a programming advice site (that Quora could never hope to displace), and is aggressively moving to other fields; its English Language site is well established in the googles too.

FWIW, Nikolay Starostin’s answer to Is Quora overtaking Stack Exchange? indicates that Quora has been ahead of Stack Exchange this past year, but not by an overwhelming margin; and Quora’s numbers are skewed by its high Indian population.

Outside of English, Zhihu may be a Chinese knockoff of Quora, but it guarantees that Quora won’t even bother to step into the Chinese space; Mainland Chinese are well known for not venturing outside the Great Firewall. TheQuestion may ending doing the same thing with Runet. OTOH, it does not seem that the French and German existing alternatives to Quora pose a serious challenge.

Hm.

I’m bypassing the obvious answer, Frangosyriani, because that’s a song that in a sense ended the Classic Rebetika period, and marked the start of the taming of the tradition that brought about laika music.

Songs that I have a lot of time for myself include:

Πέντε Χρόνια Δικασμένος (1934). Music & Lyrics: Vangelis Papazoglou.

stixoi.info: Πέντε χρόνια δικασμένος ( Γεντί κουλέ )

https://youtube.com/watch?v=sFKmVyOZLKI

Been condemned for five years
to Yedi Kule jail.
Had the blues so bad,
I started smoking the bong.

Blow, suck, drag it in.
Step on it and light it up.
Keep a look out for the hillbillies,
them jailers.

Five more years forgotten
by you, my dear.
The guys would light me up
the bong, to cheer me up.

Now I’m out
of Yedi Kule jail.
Fill up that bong
so we can have a smoke,

Blow, suck, drag it in.
Step on it and light it up.
Keep a look out for the alley,
here come two schmolicemen.

Κάν’ τονε Σταύρο, κάν’ τονε (1935). Music & Lyrics: Markos Vamvakaris

stixoi.info: Κάν΄ τονε Σταύρο, κάν΄ τονε

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PZgKSrIzTMQ

Set it up, Stavros, set it up,
light a fire and burn it up.

Give a puff to Mad George,
craftsman and woodworker.

Have a drag, John the carter,
you sly den-dweller.

Give it to our dear Nick,
so he can satisfy his yearning.

Give a drag to our Batis,
the thug and lady-killer.

Έφοδος στον τεκέ (1933). Lyrics: Giorgos Kamvysis. Music: Petros Kyriakos

Why yes, the animation on the video *is* by one Nick Nicholas.

stixoi.info: Έφοδος στον τεκέ

A raid on the hashish den

I started reading this book early in the evening:

Bare-faced Messiah

I did not put it down until 10 am the following morning. I did not sleep; I just kept reading and reading. The narrative it presented, of L Ron sinking into his own mythos on board a Sea Org cruise ship meandering through the Mediterranean, was devastatingly enthralling.

I’m afraid I’ve already exhausted my store of proverbial wisdom in previous answers:

• See: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some weird expressions?
• See: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your favorite proverb from your culture or country? What country is it from?

For starters, in the West, Greek affixes were used in scholarship, where it was felt they were more nuanced than what Latin had to offer. Suffixes to express ethnicity were felt to be a less rarefied domain, and English and Latin between them had it covered.

For seconds, Greek differentiated between suffixes denoting ethnicity, and adjectival suffixes. –ikos was only the latter. So a vase might be Athēnaïkos, but Thucydides could only ever be Athēnaios. Just as he was a Hellene, and not a Hellenic.

That’s why when the –ic suffix is used against countries, as OP noted, it is used as a scholarly specialist term, rather than as an ethnic term, and it is used as a convenient way to differentiate a major language from its superfamily. Germanic vs German, Turkic vs Turkish.

This is terribly inconvenient for Greek, in which Germanikos and Tourkikos are merely the adjectives for German, Turkish. The former is accordingly rendered as Teutonikos instead, but such synonyms are not usually available. The only real solution for the latter is to call them Tourkogeneis Glosses, Turkogenous languages — that is, languages that originated from (small-t) Turks.

Some of us complain about how Quora now does not let you customise anything, ever, at all, about your user experience. This is clearly an ideological thing for Quora Design.

Well, lookie here at what user config used to look like on Quora in 2010:

What can we learn from Quora?

That pendulum has swung the other way, hard; and it sure looks like it’s had a long way to swing…

A quote in this StackExchange thread applies to both 2010 Quora and current Quora:

There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies; the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. — C. A. R. Hoare – abel Jan 12 ’11 at 13:58

Ριζοχώρι – Μεσσηνία | Terrabook

The village name was Lapi, which was believed to refer to the Lab tribe of Albanians (normally rendered in Greek as Liapis, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a folk etymology).

As inevitably happened with most foreign-looking village names, the village was renamed to Rizochori in 1940. The link reports that its current population is 60.

https://www.google.com.au/maps/p…

I’m turning 46. Vague back pain, which I can mostly ignore. Occasional headaches and lightheadedness, apparently associated with adjusting to new medication, which I am finding it harder to ignore. And of course, the heartache of a middle-aged man’s disappointments.