Month: March 2017

It is critical. Topics are how questions are distributed to potential answerers. MVW is a motivator to answer questions (and one that I do not think should have been hidden); but without topics, your questions simply aren’t going to get distributed to those that care to answer them at all.

The Swedish gender neutral pronoun hen has a lot of controversy around it, as divergent responses here on Quora show:

• How has the gender-neutral pronoun experiment in Swedish worked out so far?
• Is the creation of a gender neutral pronoun such as “hen” in Swedish considered semiotic warfare?
• What are the official recommended object and possessive forms of the Swedish gender-neutral pronoun hen?
• Why did the Swedish succeed in reforming the language by adding a gender neutral pronoun “hen” when English speakers failed?

So: not necessarily as well as you might think. In fact, English they/them has an advantage over many languages’ attempts at gender-neutral pronouns: there’s linguistic precedent for it (though it was as a non-specific, rather than as a primarily gender-neutral pronoun)

The analogy is not with juice as in orange juice, as suggested by Dobhran Black’s answer to Could someone tell how electric power resembles juice?. Clearly there’s an analogy with fluids to be made; but why juice and not water? Or quicksilver?

Or blood?

The analogy is with vital juices, a concept that was kicking around as a literal concept from the ancient Greeks until modern medicine, and that indeed persists even now, both metaphorically, and in reference to plants (to judge from Google Books).

Vital juices encompasses the fluids moving within a living organism, that allow it to keep living. If the vital juices are flowing through the organism, then it does things like grow (if it’s a plant) and move (if it’s an animal).

If there’s electricity flowing through a machine, then it does things that resemble life: it is animated, so to speak. It moves, it whirrs, it does things.

So, the similarity is both the fluidity of electricity, and the vitality it confers.

Metaphorical reference to any visit to a prestigious or desirable site as a pilgrimage? Sure, English does that. In fact, right here on Quora:

Why do people (like to) say “I made a pilgrimage to the Apple Store” as if it were Mecca?

Is it true that all mafiosi must make an annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas?

Pratik Bakshi’s answer to What are some amazing facts about Pokémon GO, both as a game and out in the world?: According to reddit ” Playing Pokémon Go in India is almost a pilgrimage.”

With the anglosphere mainstream being either Protestant or Secular, it’s been quite easy for them to use the word more metaphorically these days.

Remind me Chrysovalanti: is the Greek word you’d use προσκύνημα? Because pilgrimage is certainly one of its meanings, but it applies rather more broadly than pilgrimage: it applies to any veneration of relics or saints, and does not require that you travel far. Of course, the veneration of relics is no more Protestant or Secular than a pilgrimage is.