From someone I used to hang out with on IRC. (Yes, I am that old.)

“Nick Nicholas! You wouldn’t be half as obnoxious as you are if you weren’t called that!”

Um… I thank you, and my three cousins called Nick Nicholas also thank you?

High school frenemy (well, friend in high school, because I didn’t know any better back then) is in my office a decade later, visiting. I’ve just concluded a call with the French embassy, trying to recover a computer for a staff member in the department, while my frenemy waited.

“Well. That was surprisingly professional.”

Um, say that in my office, will you. Yeah, sod off.

There are two solutions:

1. Create an answer wiki, and have some poor schlubs index every incoming answer against some categories in the wiki, and ask that new answerers update it. That’s what the community has been doing.
2. Launch a hostile takeover of Quora Inc, hire new UX management, ban the ever-flowing page model as so, so 2010, and reintroduce paging. That scenario is currently restricted to my dreams. 🙂

One-liner, the question says?

OK then:

NOT: to share and grow the world’s knowledge. (Our Mission by Adam D’Angelo on The Quora Blog)

That’s a mission statement. Far be those from me.

NOT: a place to get answers to my questions.

Yishan Wong’s answer to Why are my questions not answered on Quora?: “Quora is not a place to get your question answered. […] Quora is a great place to write answers and to read answers, but it is not a good place to get your own questions answered.”

How do I explain Quora to outsiders?

I make no apology whatever for the fundamental disconnect between Quora’s notion of itself, and my own:

Facebook for smart people.

Originally Answered:

Why is the word colonel pronounced kernel?

Vote #2, Daniel Ross: Daniel Ross’ answer to Why is the word Colonel pronounced like kernel when there is no R in the word?

Vote #1 me, because I go a bit further. 🙂 I checked with OED.

So, the word started as colonnello in Italian.

The word became coronnel in French. Dissimilation, as Daniel points out. It’s also coronel in Spanish.

The word was borrowed into English in the 15th century as corronel. Pronounced with three syllables and an r.

In 1580, people started translating Italian military treatises into English, and spelling it as collonel.

Now, there were two pronunciations and two spellings in English of the word. The French corronel and the Italian collonel.

We reduced it down to one spelling by the 18th century. And we reduced it down to one pronunciation by the 18th century. And as too often happens in English, we use the one alternative in the spelling, and the other alternative in the pronunciation.

So, let’s ignore the spelling and stick to the pronunciation. I’ll add fauxnetics, with some disgust. According to dictionaries of English

• In 1710, it was /ˈkʌrəʊnɛl/ (currownell)
• In 1766, it was /ˈkɔːnɪl/ (cornill)
• In 1780 it was /ˈkɜːnɛl/ (curnell), the pronunciation it has now.
• In 1816, the older pronunciation (cor(o)nell with an o) was still around:
• “Both the English and Scottish, but particularly the latter, pronounce the word Coronel, and so do the Irish.” (C. James, New Military Dictionary)
• Some guy in 1825 spelled it phonetically as cawnel.

So what were the changes?

• Dissimilation of l to r, already back in French.
• Moving the stress from the last syllable (coronéll—it was French, after all) to córonell. That happened sometime in the 17th century, and it indicates the word being considered by English speakers as English now and not French.
• Dropping an unstressed syllable, coronell to cornell. Irregular in English, but it does happen. OED says that was first attested in 1669.
• The change that noone seems to talk about is cornell to curnell. That seems to me an assimilation of the vowels, from /kornel/ to /kernel/ (using fauxnemes): an /e/ before an /r/ is going to be pronounced as an /ɜ/. If English spelling was less silly, it would be kornell being respelled as kernell.

Because there used to be a taboo against swearing oaths by divine figures in Protestant England, and the taboo against oaths got conflated with the taboo against profanity, as Saying Bad Things.

In fact, that conflation also applies to oath:

the definition of oath

5. an irreverent or blasphemous use of the name of God or anything sacred.

Message from Tom on his ban, relayed by his PMO:

Tom Higgins has been banned by Promethea on Promethea Updates

So. MVW removed from profiles. Follows You tag removed from profiles.

What other subtle hints might Quora UI drop, that this is not a social network, and the individual profiles of answerers do not matter?

Assuming, of course, that…

Well, lookie here:

Highlighting of writer names? Gone today.

Let me unpack your question there, Uri.

When did μπ stop being pronounced [mp] and started being pronounced [mb], with voice assimilation? Early. It does not occur in Southern Italian Greek (them saying [panta] instead of [panda] for “forever” really sticks out), but it does everywhere else in Greek, and it’s a change that could have happened before /b/ without a preceding nasal went to /β/ > /v (which was in place by 1st century AD). I don’t doubt that we’re talking 1st millennium AD for /mp/ > [mb].

When did μπ start being used to transliterate /b/ in foreign languages, just as ντ started being used to transliterate /d/? Late. The giveaway is initial μπ, which violates Ancient Greek phonotactics. I wrote on the various transliterations of Bagdad in Byzantine sources, at Nastratios in Pagdatia. They uniformly use either Beta (anachronistically), or Pi for the initial /b/. Looking at the Lexikon der Byzantinischen Gräzität, initial μπ for loanwords with /b/ seem to become routine only from the 13th century on, though there look to be sporadic earlier instances.

The use of the term Anglo–Celtic in Australia has to do with the history of ethnic relations and the formation of the dominant identity in that country.

For a very long time, the Irish and their descendants, identified through Catholicism, were a separate and somewhat disadvantaged identity in Australia. They had trouble accessing the highest levels of power. They had separate schooling in the Catholic system. Sectarian conflict in the school yard, the workplace, and beyond was a real thing as late as the 1950s. And, with Aboriginal Australians decimated and marginalised, and the imposition of the White Australia policy, Catholic anglohone Australians were the most visible minority in Australia.

But the extent to which they were a minority should not be overstated. In most ways, Catholic and Protestant Anglophone Australians shared a common culture, and much of the time a common identity.

With the post war influx of Southern Europeans into Australia, people started to identify and discuss the dominant majority culture in the 70s. It was the culture that southern European Australians did not immediately fit into, and it needed a name. With British deprecated as an identity by then for descendants of the First Fleet, the first term people jumped on was Anglo.

But the memory of sectarian conflict among Anglophones was very recent. Catholic Anglophone Australians could grudgingly accept that they were part of a majority culture; but they would not accept being subsumed within a Protestant default, which is what Anglo (English) implies. They themselves had been the subalterns not that long ago. So out of sensitivity to this divide, the hybrid term Anglo–Celtic was coined.

The experience through the rest of the Anglosphere was different.

• England has had a Catholic minority for a couple of centuries, but it identifies its majority culture as English, not Anglo-Celtic.
• Scotland, Ireland, and Wales are Anglophone, but identify as Celtic.
• The dominant culture in the US was a Melting Pot of not only English and Celts, but also Dutch and Germans and Scandinavians. And that culture first defined itself not against Southern Europeans, but against Native Americans and Blacks. So the term it adopted was White.
• The dominant originally European identity in South Africa also defined itself against Blacks. And the divide between Afrikaners and Anglophones was much more profound than that between Protestant and Catholic Anglophones. So there was no urgency to speak of Anglo-Celtic South Africans.
• I don’t know as much about Canada, but the dominant Anglophone Protestant identity there defined itself against French Canadians first, and Celtic Canadians second. So after British passed out of fashion, Anglpohone was readily adopted, and presumably did not disgruntle Celtic Canadians unduly.
• The dominant identity in New Zealand had to define itself from the beginning against the Maori, who are not decimated and put out of mind the way that Australian aboriginals were. Like in Australia, that identity initially defined itself as British. Like in the US, that identity ended up defining itself racially, as not Polynesian, using the Maori word Pakeha.

Likely yes.

See:

• Does Quora’s policy on joke answers need to be reformed or modified? Many people believe it’s inconsistently and arbitrarily enforced.
• What is Quora’s policy on humorous answers/reviews?
• Quora’s answer to What is Quora’s answer collapse policy? What types of answers aren’t allowed on Quora?

And in particular:

Quora’s answer to What is Quora’s policy on humorous answers/reviews?

Humorous answers and reviews are allowed if they make the page more helpful to someone who is sincerely interested in learning the answer to the question; otherwise they are not. Answers and Reviews that are intended as jokes are not helpful responses. In addition, humorous answers and reviews that deliberately misinterpret the intent of the question/topic will be collapsed.

Quora may allow a satirical answer if it is couched with a “but seriously, …” or a “as the following reductio ad absurdum would illustrate”. But a straight joke answer will usually be reported, typically by another user, and will be collapsed.

The policy does claim that if an answer already has more than 50 upvotes (which yours did, OP: Jack Menendez’s answer to Why Trump is considered to be the greatest president in America history?), the collapse needs to be approved by three moderators.

I really am not defending Quora reflexively on this. There are some things I don’t like about Quora’s policies, and some more that I dislike about how they are implemented.

But the premise of Quora is not open-ended writing like Medium, or provocative literature like what Swift wrote. The premise of Quora is informative responses to sincere requests for information (which can still be humorous, as long as an actual answer is in there). The question may have been bait, as John Gragson answered elsewhere, but the culture is either to ignore it, or to make the response unambiguously framed.

In truth, if you (or Jon Swift) had just appended “… but yeah, no”, there would have been less room for instacollapsing.

There is a vital role for polemic in society. And maybe Quora is “a purveyor of ignorance and half truths”, as you put it in your answer, by suppressing polemic. But Quora has decided that it is not primarily a purveyor of polemic. Hence, after all, the aggressive policing of BNBR.