Often? I dunno, but I’ve certainly caught myself using use case rather more often than I should outside of work. It’s such a slippery term in IT, it’s very easy to overgeneralise.

I get some mileage out of business plan too, mainly as something that institutions all around me don’t seem to have articulated. I think ROI (Return On Investment) has come out my lips once or twice.

From my time in linguistics, etic vs emic distinction was something of a party piece. That one’s harder to trot out in a non-linguist context.

My word of the month has been hegemony; I wish it was work jargon.

Archie D’Cruz wrote on How can I find out if I have been mentioned in an answer?

There has been a months-long bug with Notifications, which means it’s become something of a lottery as to when you get informed about when you get tagged in an answer.

…

If you’re actually looking for bad news, it’s that it’s still impossible to tell when you’ve been mentioned in a comment if you don’t get notified. For now, comments remain part of the dark underground.

Now, this is paranoid thinking. Of course it is.

But there’s been a whole barrage of UX changes recently, that have deprecated interaction between users on the platform.

Amirite?

And this unpredictability of notifications of @-mentions has been in place for months. It got several mentions on the late, lamented Rage Against Quora.

So…

Originally Answered:

How many of you Quorans wrote books and what are their titles?

One academic text, a translation and commentary of a mediaeval Greek poem.

• Nicholas, N. & Baloglou, G. 2003. An Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds: Translation and Commentary. (Records of Western Civilization) New York: Columbia University Press. 557 pp.

One introduction to the Lojban language:

• Nicholas, N. & Cowan, J.C. (eds) 2003. What is Lojban? / .i la lojban. mo. Fairfax (Va.): Logical Language Group. 174+iii pp.

Two translations of Shakespeare into Klingon:

• Shakespeare. W. 2001. paghmo’ tIn mIS. Tr. Nicholas, N. [Translation of Much Ado About Nothing into Klingon.] Flourtown (Pa.): Klingon Language Institute. 199+xii pp.
• Shakespeare, W. 2000. The Klingon Hamlet. Tr. Nicholas, N. & Strader, A. [Translation of Hamlet into Klingon; revised.] New York: Pocket Books. 219+xvi pp.

Dimitris is a Greek Quora user, who is currently a first year university student in Scotland. His age should be incidental, and as far as I am concerned, it is.

He has an astonishing amount of erudition about European and Middle Eastern history. Not the superficial kind, of rattling off facts and names: the deep kind, of drawing comparisons and motivations and conclusions.

I don’t always agree with where he goes, and he’d prefer it that way: it annoys him when people say they agree where they underlyingly don’t. I do agree with him a lot of the time, for things I know about, and I learn much from him, for things I don’t. He is an asset. He is what this site is for.

See Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why isn’t there a single Modern Latin language like Modern Greek?

The ascendancy of English as a world language of diplomacy is after WWII. Before WWII, it was French, and keeping French around as the second world language in international organisations (including the Olympic movement) is mostly legacy.

There are countries where French gets you further than English, but those countries now are not European countries (other than France, Wallonia, Luxembourg and Suisse Romande); they are the African Francophonie.

Collapsed through downvotes, as another answer noted, and I’ve added mine.

Nothing I argued is factually wrong or constitute a personal insult.

Well, let’s see:

Yes, just like a bachelor degree in some stupid general studies or literature already lost its value.

people who pass exams, or stay endlessly in academic ivory towers to get degrees

Many of those adjuncts with Ph.D.s work as contract labour, because they lack the entreprenurial spirits of many second class graduates and dropouts who build companies, sell ideas.

It’s not even that you’re wrong; I don’t think you are. It’s that your tone is sneering against academia, and extols entrepreneurs (which I can just as readily denigrate as snake oil salesmen). You don’t have to insult individuals, to come across as insulting.

I don’t know why it was a priority for it to be eliminated, and I’ve disliked most of the recent barrage of UI changes. This one, I didn’t mind: I did not find most of the trending topics interesting to me, and while it’s good to see what people think of current affairs on Quora, it didn’t add much value to me to have it in the sidebar.

I am much more worried about this:

Changes to Trending Topics by Abhinav Sharma on Quora Product Updates

Going forward, we will continue to mark topics as trending, and this information will be used to surface them appropriately in the main feed.

Right. Because I really want the latest stupid-arse thing Trump says showing up in my feed. That’s why I’m on Quora instead of CNN. The good thing about trending being in the sidebar was, it was segregated from my feed.

This change allows us to have more flexibility in the ways we present trending topics throughout the product.

When Quora says “Flexibility” for its UX, reach for Bug? or Feature?

Unfortunately I don’t have style books to hand, but practice on this has varied in English. 100 years ago, the convention was to write only the first and the last letter of the obscenity, and to put dashes between them: d—d. The contemporary practices I have seen are to put ellipses between the first and last letter (f…k), to put asterisks between the first the last letter (f**k), and to put an asterisk in place of the first vowel (f*ck). The use of Random shift key symbols is a comic strip convention, and I have not seen it in books.

Of the three conventions, replacing just the vowel is a lot clearer, but for that reason if there’s more risk of offence, and I would regard it as more informal. Online, the norm I have seen is multiple asterisks. In newspapers, the norm I have seen is ellipses.

Change to Most Viewed Writer by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates