Day: June 19, 2017

Give to her joy, you callused world, give peace,
this lady who should never, ever cry.
Let it have air to bloom, roots to release,
this beauty which should never, ever die.

This smile, which neither coin nor bonds can buy,
let it be sheltered from the bondsman’s blame.
This heart so generous, this glance so wry,
let their reward be more than they can name.

Sleep now, my sweet, sleep while the world’s aflame.
There will be time to mourn it yet. Your hair
smoulders in auburn whorls, which none can tame.
Tomorrow, you’ll catch fire again and flare,

to stand your ground, and take what you deserve.
The stars fall at your feet, eager to serve.

A “Stay Safe Out There” to all of you.

Comments on this blog, as with the Necrologue, are being reported for BNBR infractions. Two commenters at How to Get Thousands of Leads from Quora in Five Months!!!! have been reported, and their comments deleted. And of course, the post itself got reported for BNBR.

A reminder to all blog readers and posters to BNBR. By Quora’s standards, rather than yours.

😐

I’m putting these links up.

I suggest we not comment on them, given what happened last time.

Just read these. Knowledge… is power.

• How to Turn Quora into a Traffic-Driving Machine for Your Blog
• Easily Growth Hack 1,500+ Visits From Quora

Street or road name – Wikipedia

In Australia and New Zealand, some streets are called parades. Parade: A public promenade or roadway with good pedestrian facilities along the side. Examples: Peace Celebration Parade, Marine Parade, King Edward Parade, Oriental Parade and dozens more. However, this term is not used in North America or Great Britain.

OED parade.n1, meaning 4:

A public square or promenade; (also) a row of shops in a town, or the street on which they are situated. (Frequently in the names of such streets, squares, or promenades.)

That meaning is not at all restricted to Australia, and in fact it is attested since 1697; as a street type, it may be an archaism that is restricted to Oceania.

So:

• 1697, Dampier, New Voyage Around The World: This Square is calcled [sic] the Parade.
• 1775, Sheridan, Rivals: We saunter on the parades [at Bath].
• 1863, Hawthorne, Our Old Home: The smart parades and crescents of the former town.
• 1885, Phone Book, Brighton, England: Vizer E.B…154, Marine-parade.
• 1922, Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room: The parade smelt of tar which stuck to the heels.

The 1885 example clearly is an English street name.

Oh, shut up, QCR.

Masiello and Gwin.

Others applaud them. I panic for them. I want it to work out, they are both good souls who have earned respite, and find it in each other; I worry that they may not work out, because the world is a cruel place.

Yes, nothing ventured nothing gained. And at least, they are both old and wise enough to know.

I worry so much, that the first song to pop into my head was this. Lyrics Kostas Tripolitis, Music Mikis Theodorakis, 1981: late Mikis. Lyrics disillusioned and fearful; music soaring and yearning. Αγάπη: Love. stixoi.info: Αγάπη

Love of bread and fire,
Love of brackishness.
Billboards will choke us
and empty beer cans.

Where can I take you away?
Glass and sheet metal
have filled the years
with expired months.

Love of bread and rain,
Love out on the balconies.
You’ll see blood on the asphalt
and plastic containers.

Where can I take you away?
Glass and sheet metal
have filled the years
with expired months.

I worry, too, that you’ll talk each other mad. Too wise to woo, bickering constantly, exasperatingly, charmingly, like Beatrice and her Benedick. But they got to have their day in the sun, in the end. And so do you:

Did Socrates really say “if you get a bad wife, you’ll become a philosopher” in any original texts like Plato’s or Xenophon’s dialogue?

Two sources named:

John Uebersax’s answer to Did Socrates really say “if you get a bad wife, you’ll become a philosopher” in any original texts like Plato’s or Xenophon’s dialogue?

Diogenes Laertius, Life of Socrates XVII

And he used to say, that one ought to live with a restive woman, just as horsemen manage violent-tempered horses; “and as they,” said he, “when they have once mastered them, are easily able to manage all others; so I, after managing Xanthippe, can easily live with any one else whatever.”

Michael Kambas’ answer to Did Socrates really say “if you get a bad wife, you’ll become a philosopher” in any original texts like Plato’s or Xenophon’s dialogue?

Xenophon, Symposium (2.10)

“If that is your view, Socrates,” asked Antisthenes, “how does it come that you don’t practise what you preach by yourself educating Xanthippe, but live with a wife who is the hardest to get along with of all the women there are—yes, or all that ever were, I suspect, or ever will be?”

“Because,” he replied, “I observe that men who wish to become expert horsemen do not get the most docile horses but rather those that are high-mettled, believing that if they can manage this kind, they will easily handle any other. My course is similar. Mankind at large is what I wish to deal and associate with; and so I have got her, well assured that if I can endure her, I shall have no difficulty in my relations with all the rest of human kind.”

Diogenes Laertius had συνεῖναι τραχείᾳ γυναικὶ “to be with a rough woman”; Xenophon had χρῇ γυναικὶ “you are supplied with a woman”. Neither of them had an explicit word for marrying at all.

What does fluency mean in a conlang like Klingon?

Actually “fluency” is something of a misnomer I committed. What does good style mean in a conlang like Klingon? People clearly do differentiate between good Klingon and bad Klingon; on what basis do they do so, when the language is made up, and we don’t have any utterances from its creator longer than a couple of lines of barked orders?

It would be a challenge to get a linguistics department to take it seriously. It would be even more of a challenge to get a literature department to take it seriously, and it would be the kind of thesis that could do with input from someone dealing with rhetoric (which linguists tend to think beneath them). But there’s a PhD in it, for sure. And it spans across mental models of style, and fads in English prose style, and translation theory; in fact, it reaches into the theory of aesthetics.

It’s the question that got me into linguistics, btw (in its Lojban iteration). And I sort of have an answer for it, as the answer linked shows. But it can be filled out a lot more than that.

Nothing as comprehensive or as well maintained, for the reasons given in Michael Chen’s answer: noone’s strongly motivated to reinvent NLTK when NLTK is already there.

There’s a list of projects at gopherdata/resources. There’s bits of what NLTK does among them.

If you want to make sense of English vowel pronunciation, Middle English phonology – Wikipedia is always a good place to start.

Do had a long ō. (As it still does, allowing for the Great English Vowel Shift.)

The Middle English 3rd person of do was dōeth, if the verb was a main verb, and dōth, if it was an auxiliary.

Long ō before a th normally became /uː/, as in sooth, booth; but it sometimes became /ʌ/, as in mōther, ōther. And dōth. (No, I don’t know what the rule was, if any.)

Does is a conventional spelling of dō-s replacing dō-th (evoking do-eth). As far as I can tell, a Middle English dōs could only have ended up pronounced as /duːz/: I doo, you doo, she dooz. The pronunciation of the oe in does, to rhyme with buzz, is clearly carried over from the o of dōth: the -th changed to -z only after the ō had changed to ʌ.

… Ah. I see Brian Collins’ answer to How come does is not pronounced as /doʊs/? is the same as I worked out.

To quibble (and I’ve spoken about this before, as has others): Quora *does* support emojis, and does not (yet) have an explicit policy against them—only because it has made it hard for people to use them. If people do start using them, as Alexander Lee found with coloured lettering, the Policy Arm of Quora will surely spring into action.

See Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why doesn’t Quora allow the use of emoticons, when it would make the site more interactive?