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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.

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.

😐

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.

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.

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?

It used to; the [j] was regularly dropped after certain consonants:

Phonological history of English consonant clusters – Wikipedia

The change of [ɪ] to [j] in these positions (as described above) produced some clusters which would have been difficult or impossible to pronounce; this led to what John Wells calls Early Yod Dropping, in which the [j] was elided in the following environments:

• After /ʃ, tʃ, dʒ/, for example chute /ʃuːt/, chew /tʃuː/, juice /dʒuːs/
• After /j/, for example yew /juː/ (compare [jɪʊ̯] in some conservative dialects)
• After /r/, for example rude /ruːd/
• After stop+/l/ clusters, for example blue /bluː/

Apparently Welsh and some other dialects kept [ju] as [ɪu], did not undergo yod dropping, and as a result they pronounce chews /tʃɪʊ̯z/ and choose /tʃuːz/ differently. I can’t tell from Wikipedia whether that extends to rude being pronounced as ree-ood.

For Modern Greek:

• parea ‘group of people hanging out socially’. Either our solitary Catalan loan, or one of our few Ladino loans, from parea (Spanish pareja) ‘couple’. The Catalan etymology is seductive, as it involves the Catalan Company, a parea marauding the Greek countryside.
• tsonta ‘porn film’. From Venetian zonta ‘joined on’ (Italian giunta); originally meant ‘freebie, lagniappe, baker’s dozen’. Which tells you a lot about Greek cinema practice in the 50s, and their male audiences.
• teknó ‘toyboy, twink’. From Romani tiknó ‘small child’, via Kaliarda, the Romani-based Greek gay secrecy language, influenced by Church Greek téknon ‘(spiritual) child’.
• varvatos ‘macho, manly’. From Latin barbatus ‘bearded’.
• glamouria ‘glamour (sarcastically), flashiness’. From English glamour (itself ultimately from Greek grammatikē via Scots), + the colloquial suffix –ja ‘a strike of something’.
• zamanfou ‘indifference, complacency’. From French je m’en fous ‘I don’t give a fuck’. Also zamanfoutistas ‘I don’t give a fuck-ist’, zamanfoutismos ‘I don’t give a fuck-ism’.

The claim, Googling tells me, comes from Homo Prospectus (2016), by Martin Seligman et al. Its programmatic claim is that:

Our species is misnamed. Though sapiens defines human beings as “wise” what humans do especially well is to prospect the future. We are homo prospectus.

If the title is to be more accurate, then we would need to concede that (a) humans are not necessarily more ‘wise’ than chimps or dolphins or crows, and more importantly (b) that what is distinctive about human intelligence is the ability to envision a future, a mental model of time.

The attribute that usually gets brought up as unique to human intelligence is self-awareness. Googling tells me that George Herbert Mead, at least, made much of awareness of the future as part of the human mind’s ability to reflect on its self, as a defining attribute of human intelligence. (https://books.google.com.au/book…)

So, maybe? At least one psychologist seems to have thought so. Animals do plan for the future; I gather it’s still controversial to what extent they have a mental model of the future.

And thanks for the vote of confidence in A2A’ing me, Rynnah. That was a lot of googling and guesswork. 🙂

‘Turn turk’ in the Renaissance meant to convert to Islam. The Turks were the Muslims that the English had the most contact with, through the Ottoman Empire.

A Christian Turn’d Turk (1612) is a play by the English dramatist Robert Daborne. It concerns the conversion of the pirate John Ward to Islam.

Because of the entrenched association of peoples until recent times with religion, changing religion was broadly regarded as betraying one’s core principles, and being literally faithless, renegade. It is so used, metaphorically, in Shakespeare:

• [Hamlet, Hamlet to Horatio] if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me (if my fortune betrays me)
• [Much Ado About Nothing, Margaret to Beatrice] an you be not turned Turk, there’s no more sailing by the star. (Margaret alludes to the fact that Beatrice has fallen in love with Benedick, despite her protestations: as complete a change as someone converting to Islam)

Hence, surprisingly enough, an accurate definition in, of all places, Urban Dictionary: to turn turk:

To turn turk is to be a twat and back stab people

Bad that lad didn’t expect him to turn turk on you

Chambers’ Twentieth Century Dictionary adds: “to go to the bad: to become hopelessly obstinate”. The value judgement of Islam = bad is what you’d expect from a majority Christian culture; the obstinacy is surprising, unless it is the generic obstinacy of a renegade.

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