Ah, Desmond. I wade in where fools fear to tread, but better a fool than noone.

The point of the line “You have to change your life” is that the sculpture is so strikingly beautiful, it forces someone to change their life.

Well, let’s assemble our building blocks.

δεῖ σε τὸν βίον “it is necessary that you… life”

δὴ “then, at that point” or οὖν “so, therefore”: Classical Greek would want to know what this sentence has to do with the foregoing text.

ἀλλάξειν “change (perfective)”, or ἀλλάσσειν “keep changing”. But you know, ändern “to otherise” makes me think of another verb:

ἀλλοιώσειν “to other (perfective) = to alter, to change”, or ἀλλοιοῦν “to keep altering”. The verb ἀλλοιόω can have a negative connotation, particularly in Modern Greek—to adulterate, to alter from what it is supposed to be. But it doesn’t have to, and I like that it’s not just changing, but making it something different.

So I’ll put together this Attic: δεῖ σὲ δὴ τὸν βίον ἀλλοιοῦν. “Then you have to be altering your life.”

What’s the right dialect? I’d think Doric rather than Aeolic, it’s not really personal sentiment but monumental sentiment.

And I think in Doric that ends up as: δεῖ τὲ δὴ τὸν βίον ἀλλοιῶν.

But I wade in where fools fear to tread, and I’d like to hear from others who aren’t guessing. Including what you’d come up with, Desmond!

---

EDIT: After discussion with Neeraj Mathur and Desmond in comments:

δεῖ δὴ τὲ τὰν ψυχὰν ἀλλοιῶν.

δή was misplaced, and ψυχή in Homeric Greek did not yet mean “soul”; even if it had, it’s appropriate here.

Well, someone in 2014 came up with Quommunism and Quomrade:

• Blog: Quommunism
• If Quomrade D’Angelo were to run for President of the United States as head of the Quommunist party, would you vote for him in 2020?

You’ll see from my answer to the question two years later, that I was none too impressed with the coinage.

There’s the answers to What is the collective noun for Quorans (Quora Users)? Uncontroversially, Edward Conway won this with a Quorum of Quorans.

Quoring is used in at least some questions here; e.g Should I stop Quoring because no one upvotes my answers here? Why or why not?

Quorist is a rarer alternative to Quoran; e.g. For Quorists having more than one child: Why do you think that so many people decide against the deep joy of children or even stay childless?

EDIT: Also, Quoraverse: e.g. How many life forms reside in the Quoraverse?

For actual Quora lexicon, there is a good list of acronyms at Lorenzo Peroni’s answer to What acronyms or abbreviations are used frequently on Quora? What do they mean?

There’s also the long standing extension of ban to refer to edit-blocking, as a quirk of Quora vocabulary.

Answering this is just enabling pettiness, and sowing dissension between myself and my friends who are believers.

I’m answering it because I’ve found a passage I’ve been wanting to quote here for a long time. In answering it, I do not mean disrespect to my friends who are believers; and if they might take it, I beg them not to read further. But it’s a passage whose resentment has stayed with me.

---

I’ve cited Greek Mythology by the Greek humorist Nikos Tsiforos several times here. I’m citing this, the start to one of his chapters on Hermes. It’s anti-clerical, not anti-God, but it’s the same argument.

He speaks of the changes of the seasons, and sunrise and moonset, as mechanical processes that people wish to imbue meaning to, but they keep on regardless—

And all of this happens with a purpose hidden among the mysteries of the stars. And we come into the world as toothless and wrinkly babies, and we leave it as toothless and wrinkly old people. In the seventy or eighty years of our crappy existence we think ourselves the centre of the universe, we speak of transcendence and ideals, we shit and piss, some of us leave a squirt mark on history, most of us pass by unnoticed and struck down.

And the priests with their censers alongside us hound us with cauldrons full of hot pitch and torments, world without end. Why the hell? Because we’ve committed the crime of coming into this world, to live for seven or eight decades, eating our bread by our sweat and bitterness by the bushel? Well fuck off!

https://www.quora.com/api/mobile…

The Magister:

True. But should you forgive the recidivist seven times? Nay, verily, seventy times seven.

Alfredo Perozo:

Recidivist… what a woody-sounding Masiello Mega Word!

Recidivism – Wikipedia

Recidivism (/rᵻˈsɪdᵻvɪzəm/; from recidive and ism, from Latin recidīvus “recurring”, from re– “back” and cadō “I fall”) is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they had either experienced negative consequences of that behavior, or had been trained to extinguish that behavior. It is also used to refer to the percentage of former prisoners who are rearrested for a similar offense.

The term is frequently used in conjunction with criminal behavior and substance abuse. (Recidivism is a synonym for “relapse”, which is more commonly used in medicine and in the disease model of addiction.

The “plain English” synonym is “repeat offender”. But the Latin has the advantage of being derived from “fall”, as in “fall off the wagon” or “falling into sin”. And recidivism applies more generally than just the legal system; in the comment’s context, it really was about sin.

So. MVW removed from profiles. Follows You tag removed from profiles.

What other subtle hints might Quora UI drop, that this is not a social network, and the individual profiles of answerers do not matter?

Assuming, of course, that…

Well, lookie here:

Highlighting of writer names? Gone today.

Message from Tom on his ban, relayed by his PMO:

Tom Higgins has been banned by Promethea on Promethea Updates

Because there used to be a taboo against swearing oaths by divine figures in Protestant England, and the taboo against oaths got conflated with the taboo against profanity, as Saying Bad Things.

In fact, that conflation also applies to oath:

the definition of oath

5. an irreverent or blasphemous use of the name of God or anything sacred.

Originally Answered:

Why is the word colonel pronounced kernel?

Vote #2, Daniel Ross: Daniel Ross’ answer to Why is the word Colonel pronounced like kernel when there is no R in the word?

Vote #1 me, because I go a bit further. 🙂 I checked with OED.

So, the word started as colonnello in Italian.

The word became coronnel in French. Dissimilation, as Daniel points out. It’s also coronel in Spanish.

The word was borrowed into English in the 15th century as corronel. Pronounced with three syllables and an r.

In 1580, people started translating Italian military treatises into English, and spelling it as collonel.

Now, there were two pronunciations and two spellings in English of the word. The French corronel and the Italian collonel.

We reduced it down to one spelling by the 18th century. And we reduced it down to one pronunciation by the 18th century. And as too often happens in English, we use the one alternative in the spelling, and the other alternative in the pronunciation.

So, let’s ignore the spelling and stick to the pronunciation. I’ll add fauxnetics, with some disgust. According to dictionaries of English

• In 1710, it was /ˈkʌrəʊnɛl/ (currownell)
• In 1766, it was /ˈkɔːnɪl/ (cornill)
• In 1780 it was /ˈkɜːnɛl/ (curnell), the pronunciation it has now.
• In 1816, the older pronunciation (cor(o)nell with an o) was still around:
• “Both the English and Scottish, but particularly the latter, pronounce the word Coronel, and so do the Irish.” (C. James, New Military Dictionary)
• Some guy in 1825 spelled it phonetically as cawnel.

So what were the changes?

• Dissimilation of l to r, already back in French.
• Moving the stress from the last syllable (coronéll—it was French, after all) to córonell. That happened sometime in the 17th century, and it indicates the word being considered by English speakers as English now and not French.
• Dropping an unstressed syllable, coronell to cornell. Irregular in English, but it does happen. OED says that was first attested in 1669.
• The change that noone seems to talk about is cornell to curnell. That seems to me an assimilation of the vowels, from /kornel/ to /kernel/ (using fauxnemes): an /e/ before an /r/ is going to be pronounced as an /ɜ/. If English spelling was less silly, it would be kornell being respelled as kernell.

One-liner, the question says?

OK then:

NOT: to share and grow the world’s knowledge. (Our Mission by Adam D’Angelo on The Quora Blog)

That’s a mission statement. Far be those from me.

NOT: a place to get answers to my questions.

Yishan Wong’s answer to Why are my questions not answered on Quora?: “Quora is not a place to get your question answered. […] Quora is a great place to write answers and to read answers, but it is not a good place to get your own questions answered.”

How do I explain Quora to outsiders?

I make no apology whatever for the fundamental disconnect between Quora’s notion of itself, and my own:

Facebook for smart people.

There are two solutions:

1. Create an answer wiki, and have some poor schlubs index every incoming answer against some categories in the wiki, and ask that new answerers update it. That’s what the community has been doing.
2. Launch a hostile takeover of Quora Inc, hire new UX management, ban the ever-flowing page model as so, so 2010, and reintroduce paging. That scenario is currently restricted to my dreams. 🙂