Day: December 24, 2016

I am picky about following now. I am already following a lot of people by my norms, after all, and I’d rather follow people closely. I’ve put the flowchart up in Nick Nicholas’ answer to What would make you follow me?

If it’s a candidate out of the blue—like a new follower, and I wonder whether i should return the gesture: I’ll scan their topic list, and their last 20-odd answers. If I like most of them, I’ll follow. If I like only one or two, then no. So same as you OP.

But with something like 10–15 new followers a day, I’m much more summary about making a call than I was when I was getting 2–3 new followers a day.

Habib le toubib, I’m partly to blame for this question. So:

Until this past Australian financial year, I was working two jobs: 0.8 FTE as a policy analyst in education (and data analyst, and business analyst, and programmer), on AUD 120k; and 0.5 FTE as a project scientist in a digital library, on AUD 30k.

Why yes, I was working a 1.3 FTE equivalent.

I was not renewed on the latter gig, after 18 years of pouring my soul and mind into it (ah, but that’s another question); so the latter component is now gone.

Why else do you think I’ve been on Quora so much more since June?

The definitions offering are actually missing something here:

A clichéd expression is an expression that was figurative or otherwise had rhetorical potency—but which has become deprecated by stylists in a language community, because they value novelty and freshness over familiarity and conventionality in discourse. This is a cultural judgement, and one that English-language culture in particular is more prone to than others.

The bits that need to be emphasised:

• was figurative or otherwise had rhetorical potency: not just any phrase, but a phrase that used to be potent. Simon Hayes had it as pithy.
• become deprecated by stylists in a language community. Not necessarily by everyone else in that community!
• This is a cultural judgement. Many language communities are nowhere near as averse to clichés. In fact, it’s a judgement call: not all our discourse can be innovative 100% of the time, and formulaic expressions are necessary. Do you really want to be switched on while speaking 24/7?

As Bartek “asdjklasdjkl” Król has pointed out, the term has been extended from phrases to tropes and scenarios in media and artistic expression. Again, this is a cultural judgement.

Type the name in anyway.

Scroll down through all the possible matches:

As you can see, if you don’t like any of the matches, you can create a new school. But critically, the school is a topic. And it can be created and organised like any other Quora topic.

Do make sure you search for all the St Martins schools that appear as Quora topics, though. One of them might well be a match after all, and it might just be missing the right disambiguating suffix.