Nothing. Any sanction to collapse questions or answers from a banned user is separate from the action taken to ban that user. That’s not to rule it out from happening, but it is not automatically triggered, as far as we know.
Author: admin
What are some examples of word-play in constructed languages such as Esperanto and Lojban?
Esperanto neurotically tried to avoid lexical ambiguity, but didn’t get there for compounding, and between that and soundalikes, it’s doing ok. Raymond Schwartz was the main punmaster of the language.
Examples: the sundry aĝo “age” compounds in La Diversaj Aĝoj de l’ Homo, or the groanworthy “tumble dry” of Molière in El “Verdkata Testamento” (1926); Ero (lava rulo; The Miser is L’avarulo).
Lojban really is designed to avoid lexical ambiguity, including at compounding, and I don’t remember much play there, if any.
Klingon has a fair bit of polysemy, and that has been used for jokes. I’ve mentioned here, I think, my spontaneous pun when I walked into my first Klingon meetup, and a guy I’d managed to antagonise said SaH ’Iv? (“Who cares?”) Quick as a pistol, I responded jISaH jIH, naDev jIHmo’: “*I*’m present, because I’m here.” (The verb is ambiguous.)
Polysemy also explains a joke by Okrand, which at first glance seems to be an anti-joke:
Doq’a’ SuvwI’pu’? ghobe’! SuD! “Are warriors red? No! They are blue!”
The chuckle by Michael Dorn on the recording was… unnerving.
But SuD doesn’t just mean blue. (Or green. Or, in violation of how human colour works, yellow.) SuD also means “to take a risk”…
Who invented the word “Mathematics”?
In its modern meaning of mathematics, the earliest citation Liddell–Scott give is the treatise of the same name by Archytas. (However, the German Wikipedia doubts that was the original title of his work.) The term comes into its own in its modern meaning in Aristotle, a generation later, who uses it extensively.
Plato was the exact same age as Archytas and his friend, but he only used the term to mean “fond of learning” (Timaeus 88c), or “scientific” (Sophist 219c). He does get close when he refers to the three mathemata (sciences) of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy (Laws 817e), but he isn’t quite there yet, and his term for mathematics is logismos, “calculation”.
Why were some popular Quorans banned in the last few days?
Before this question, too, gets deleted:
- The reason given by Quora Moderation in those users’ edit logs was either harassment or sock puppeting.
- At least one user has found evidence on Reddit of brigading—coordinated reporting. At least two of the users banned were aware they were likely to be banned as a result.
- There have been indications in other answers to the now deleted question on these bans that there was retaliatory reporting between people.
- Quora Moderation is obligated to follow up on reports from users. The fact that they have provided rationales in the case of these bans, and that these bans came so densely, certainly indicates deliberate action.
- Quora Moderation is known to be fallible, simply from the fact that they have unbanned users that were banned. Whether these users will be unbanned or not, who knows. But sockpuppeting and harassment in particular are something Quora has zero tolerance of.
- I am not accusing the banned Quorans of this myself. I am saying that such claims from Moderation are very hard to argue against, and deem subjective.
- Finally, Quora Moderation does NOT ban users for posting boring clickbait (as a now deleted answer hints). Moderation acts on accusations of policy violation, not on subjective quality assessments.
Technically speaking, is Doggo a pidgin language?
Hate to bring the serious to the answer, but I’m with Jiim Klein:
- Pidgins are called that because of their origins, rather than their grammar, although they do tend to be remarkably similar.
- “Foreigner talk”, the way people dumb down language when talking to non-fluent speakers, are informally called pidgins, and indeed foreigner talk is a major origin of actual pidgins.
- Language games are typically not called pidgins.
- The recurring features of pidgins are things like dropping grammatical markers, using unmarked inflections, very simple syntactic structures.
Now, I’m not up on my memes, coz I’m old.
- Lolcat is a mix of foreigner talk, baby talk (which has overgeneralised inflections rather than unmarked inflections), and all-out whimsy; I find it hard to believe that any real pidgin would use the I of I can haz cheezeburger?, let alone the are of I are crying cuz I are out of focuss.
- Doge (meme) has a syntactic frame much too restricted to be a pidgin (many mis-subcategorisation, much exclamatory, such ludic), and a far more subtle sense of modifiers than any pidgin would bother with.
- I don’t know Doggo. If Doggo is not Doge, and is exemplified in How did the doggo language start? • r/OutOfTheLoop: doggo does a bork and u r doing me a frighten—then again, too much play on normal English syntax, and too much play with wrong inflections and derivations to be pidgin-like: a pidgin would just cut it down to Yu mekim mi frait.
You point out the use of gerunds for tense in Doggo as a pidgin: a pidgin is not going to know what a gerund is, because pidgins drop all the grammar they can. Tense in pidgins are separate words; the classic English-based pidgins use words like by-and-by (future), finish (perfective), been (past).
I mean, if people stuck on a plantation with no common language but what the masters barked at them spontaneously started speaking in Doggo, then yeah, Doggo would be a pidgin. But what I’m finding doesn’t look like a pidgin. What I’m finding is comically inverted English, rather than radically stripped down English.
What are some English words you used to mispronounce?
Native speaker, which makes these all the odder:
- women as… well, women instead of wimmin.
- pronounciation. Analogy ftw.
Quora has availability problems quite often. Is there a chance you will abandon it because of these problems?
It will not in itself make me leave Quora.
But it adds to the things that make me think badly of Quora—along with the UX Russian Roulette, the Black Maria of moderation removing people in the middle of the night and the headscratchingly inexplicable decisions, the lack of a clear mission, yadda yadda yadda.
I will leave Quora, as I’ve answered before, when it stops being fun—or to be more precise, when it is unfun substantially more often than it is fun. Outage is frustrating; if I’m halfway through a response on a comment, intensely frustrating, as was the case a couple of days ago. So long as its impact is less than weekly, I’ll put up with it. But these things can have a drip drip drip, cumulative effect.
How does Nick Nicholas keep track of all those Quora users who are banned, edit blocked, deactivated, etc?
I don’t keep track of them. 🙂
I solicit PMs from people, to let me know who’s been banned or blocked.
Or deactivated. In fact, deactivations really do require me to keep track of people, because I try not to report deactivations immediately—usually people come back on Quora shortly afterwards. I fail to keep track of deactivations, and I ask people to get back to me if the user is still deactivated after a couple of days. (Hence me giving lots of people a fright, by reporting User’s deactivation as early as I did.)
More to the point, I’m amazed how the people who regularly report bans and blocks keep track of them. I add in reports when I notice them, but I don’t notice them nearly as often as my regular reporters do.
I also subscribe to the Quora Account Suspension and Bans topic, so I will get news of some “Why was X banned?” questions before they are deleted. But PMs are far and away the main source of information.
For you, what are femininity and masculinity?
For me, the words are very meaningful, and I do care if a person is feminine or masculine.
But then, noone would confuse me with anyone who’s answered the opposite.
I am also very much aware of the contingency and cultural specificity of femininity and masculinity as constructs. I am aware that there are plenty of people who have difficulty or malaise aligning to them. I am aware that they can lead to toxic consequences unchecked, and that there is a consensus in flux about how they are negotiated and defined and externalised and internalised.
Vote #1 Victoria Weaver of course: Victoria Weaver’s answer to For you, what are femininity and masculinity? I’m talking about the sociological sense here.
Are they real? As real as fashion sense or race or music. They’re all in the head. That doesn’t mean they’re not real. That doesn’t mean they can’t be a source of good in the world—they’re constructs that it is up to us to harness. And they don’t disappear in a puff of smoke, just because we’ve identified their downsides.
To talk of the psychological sense: I’m not going to apologise for finding femininity attractive, or for feeling good about certain aspects of masculinity. I have a socially conditioned sexuality, and having a sexuality is a good thing. In itself, having a straight sexuality doesn’t make me (to pull out some representative examples) biphobic, transphobic, squicked by agender or bigender people, or whatever else. For me; others will see it differently, I expect.
I do not believe that having a sexuality, informed by constructs of masculinity and femininity, automatically makes you a pig; I also have a superego, after all. And the norms that inform that superego, and that determine the sociological nature of gender constructs, are being remoulded and renegotiated. As well they should.
What does Quora look like for a banned user?
Another recent data point: Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir
I wasn’t given a reason — all I know is that I was automatically logged out yesterday, and the next moment I’m locked out of logging in because I’m permanently banned. I lost a lot of detailed answer drafts, some content I’d written in response to questions in Quora messages, and a 8000+ word blog post criticising The Political Compass. I’m glad I’d at least posted the long comments I was writing before I got banned.