Category: Uncategorized

Vote #1 Emre Sermutlu’s answer. Because I’m just some random Greek. Emre Sermutlu’s answer to Why hasn’t Turkey adopted federalism if it is big enough and divided into seven regions?

Turkish Quorans may know me as an interested neighbour (Greek). Being Greek, the para about Turks being forced on the defensive in Emre’s answer is one that of course I’m going to disagree with. The Young Turks were plenty nationalistic on their own. The real point was that both the Young Turks and the Greeks and Armenians were not prepared to live together in a multiethnic Ottoman Empire—even if it was no longer one where the Muslims were privileged.

But with the overall tenor of Emre’s answer, of course I agree:

Different groups must like each other enough to be the part of the same structure, yet they must feel [my edit] different enough to warrant their own sub-structure.

And of course, there’s a third component. The ruling class of the country must not feel threatened by the difference of groups in the structure.

The guys in Trabzon, who Emre says will beat you up if you advocate for their autonomy, would also be sympathetic to the stunting of Turkish dialectology until fairly recently in Turkey: “There are no dialects of Turkish! There is only Turkish!”

And before anyone says anything, Greece has long done exactly the same thing.

Thx4A2A, Irene. I’d say that in Armenian, but my wife doesn’t speak it. 🙁

This is a painful question for me, as I was an Esperantist for a fair while.

But even before the Espereantists split about whether the “final victory” was worth messianically waiting for, they were very careful not to convey a message that Esperanto would displace ethnic languages (even though, if the hegemony of the final victory ever happened, that would be the expected outcome). Esperanto was always meant to be a second language only.

I won’t address the fact that the hypothetical is implausible, that a common language would not unite all people, as proven by every civil war ever.

I will say that my identity as an English-speaker and a Greek-speaker is definitional to me, and I will not wish to relinquish it.

The march of technology means that we’re going to see similar challenges to our identities within our lifetimes, even if not this one. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be on the wrong side of those challenges, myself.

This has been mentioned several times elsewhere here, and it’s not just Australian, it’s a British inheritance. Though I think we here have ramped it up to eleven. And it certainly disconcerts visitors. Hell, it’s disconcerted me.

If Australians like you, they will make merciless fun of you.

If they’re being civil to you, that’s when you worry.

This has been brought up here as a partial explanation for Australians’ casual racist sounding banter: that the emphasis is on the banter, and the racism is not malicious. Maybe, maybe not; it’s complicated. But we certainly aren’t a nation to tiptoe about race relations, for better and worse.

But yeah. I did a launch of our department’s Working Papers, which I’d coedited, when I was 25.

I was heckled.

That was apparently a show of affection and respect. Who knew.

Inexplicably, OP, you’ve A2A’d me.

I played in school orchestra, and gave that up for university. I did have my dreams crushed later, with academia.

And for all that it’s the worst thing to have happened in my life, I would not take it back. It’s made me who I am.

So I don’t know about pit orchestras, although I am grateful for what they do, but I do know about dreams being crushed.

Allow me to say some avuncular shit per your request. Some of it will crush your dreams. Some of it should. None of it means you should not pursue the profession.

---

• Even the dream job is still just a job.
• With petty admin shit, with office fights, with jealousies, with long hours, and with not enough personal validation. There’s group validation, as part of a team; but that too is fleeting. It’s work.
• The pay is shit, and you gotta eat. Expect to be doing a day job. If you’re lucky, it’s a day job with its own set of fulfillments. If you’re unlucky, it’s like your night job, but even worse. Work out whether you’d be cool teaching or not.
• It’s not a soloist gig, but it’s still a gig to which many are called and few are chosen. (Unless you’re a violist; they’re always in demand, and it’s worth the lameass viola jokes.) Have a plan B. And C, and D. In fact, that applies now for any job ever, but it especially applies to the performing arts.

You know what I’d tell starry eyed kids wanting to do a PhD in linguistics? Do it, only if you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else in life. Otherwise, spare yourself the heartache.

I’m proud that I talked my best student out of it, and I hope she’s got a fulfilling career as a psychologist somewhere.

If your inmost soul craves being in a pit orchestra, Hayley, make it happen. But please go into it with your eyes open.

The fact you’re asking this suggests you will. Good luck!

*checks profile*

Oh and OP? You’re 16. You’re British, which means your uni situation is not as dire as in the US, so you still have time to dip your toe in and change your mind.

Ah, Mlle Demoritto, this question causes me amusement, because it betrays your lack of Anglo-Saxon repression.

The Anglo-Saxon proverbial expression is, there are three topics that one should never bring up for social discussion: Sex, Politics, and Religion. All three are regarded as too hot.

This is obviously a culture-specific judgement, and different cultures and individuals will have completely different opinions. Some cultures, and a lot of people, are quite ok to talk about sex. In countries without a sectarian divide, or where there is long-entrenched freedom of religion, religion will be far less toxic—unless individuals are True Believers, trying to convert everyone at the dinner table.

The same actually goes for politics. In Greece, my childhood memory is that discussing politics was more an entertainment, an excuse for people to gesticulate and mock argue, than something serious and deadly (although there was an undercurrent of that too).

So the answer to your question really depends on the culture of the “we”, and on how much of a True Believer (moral, religious or ideological) “we” are.

Quite a bit.

I trained around fieldwork linguists. Which was a colossal mistake for someone working on a European language. But useful if you want to be exposed to typology. I hear the IPA horror stories of my peers here, and blanche. Can linguists differentiate between all the sounds of the IPA?

Now. Fieldwork linguists tend to like the cultures of the people they work among. And they tend not to like people they perceive as working to eradicate those cultures. They are academics, so they’re already on preponderance predisposed against religion. (The most visionary linguist we had was a pastor in training, and eventually moved across to theology—and anti-Islamic rhetoric. Our homegrown computational linguistics giant was a fieldworker, and a missionary. Both were regarded by their colleagues with amused detachment.)

I learned more about typology working as a research assistant than doing a PhD. Just as well, because my PhD wasn’t in typology. I was research assistant for a prof doing a phonological survey of Papua New Guinea.

PNG has, what, 1/8 of the world’s languages? 1/6?

How many academic linguists have signed up for a lifestyle of malaria and dysentery, so they can record obscure languages there?

More than there used to be. We’ve run out of new languages among our Indigenous Australians, so PhDs wanting to write a grammar of an underdocumented language are sent to PNG now. But still, of the 800-odd languages there, I’d be surprised if even more more than 50 are documented to an acceptable scholarly level.

You know who’s prepared to sign up for a lifestyle of malaria and dysentery, to record languages in PNG for their own motives?

Of course you do.

Academic Linguists owe a lot to SIL International. Some of them wish they didn’t. While the SIL missionaries are sometimes linguistic incompetents, sometimes they are brilliant linguists; it’s mixed.

I know one thing, though. Vanuatu has the highest density of languages on earth: 110 languages, population of 300k. Vanuatu, for reasons that a lot of linguists would be sympathetic to, has barred SIL from working there.

And Vanuatu, not PNG, is the most linguistically underdocumented country there is.

1. My doctor said up to 3 weeks. It took me 4. He shrugged that off.
2. Doctor. Talk to your doctor. Do not make any decisions on your own.
3. Be well aware that antidepressants are a roulette. Psychiatrists throw shit at the wall to see what will stick. They don’t work the same for everyone.
4. The usual technique is to switch your meds rather than up your dose, and you certainly don’t up the dose of brand new meds; you’re supposed to increase gently. Because again, psychiatrists are throwing shit at the wall to see what will stick. And the less feces being flung, the less the overall risk.
5. Doctor. Talk to your doctor. Do not make any decisions on your own.

There’s some critical nuance being missed in answers so far (though I strongly suspect it’s come up elsewhere here). The closest is in the sources mentioned by Mark A. Mandel, and the answer given by Matthew Carlson.

• The old use of singular they is with reference to an non-specific entity, where the use of gender would be misleading (the gender of the non-specific person is not known, and even if it is known, it is irrelevant). Hence, Shakespeare used:
  There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
  As if I were their well-acquainted friend

  The singular they is not because the gender is not known, but because it’s an non-specific referent: not a man but = every man = any man.

• The grammaticality of singular they was disputed when the prescriptivists came to town, because “not logical”, i.e. “not how Latin does things”. It’s not how most languages do things. But it is how English does things. And it’s an asterisked logic, as language logic is.
• The new use of they as gender-neutral, and the even newer use of they as non-binary may take getting used to—although I find that hard to believe for the former (which after all, is still pretty much used in non-specific contexts). The latter is much harder, because it applies to specific referents; that’s not a “logical” constraint, but a semantic constraint. I know that I keep fucking it up in my correspondence with Sam Murray, just to namedrop. But the linguistic extension is straightforward, and it’s really a matter of familiarisation to get over the definiteness block.
• And as an English speaker, I’m profoundly grateful to those in the genderfluid community who choose to go with they. Singular specific they is nothing. Neologisms like zhe and hu: those are the real linguistic annoyance.
• And yes, if someone uses them, it is polite to respect that too. But thank you to those who use the resources already there in the language.

See Singular ‘They’ for a nice succinct summary of non-binary they.

Don’t read the comments offered via Facebook if you value human dignity. “Social engineering” my tuchus.

EDIT: Thanks to Clarissa Lohr for correcting me on specificity.

I am profoundly grateful to La Gigi, for asking this question, which has brought together three of the most fascinating personalities in living memory:

I am also profoundly grateful to those who have already speculated about why on earth I would be so relentlessly fascinated by Nixon, because if they are, then they’re still talking about me!!

Even if they’re getting it wrong.

Let’s run through the speculations, shall we?

SPECULATION 1.

When I was in Atlanta last year, I mentioned my fascination to one of my wife’s former colleagues I met there.

Note: May not be an accurate depiction of my wife’s former colleague in Atlanta.

When I mentioned my relentless fascination, and that my wife and I would like to make the pilgrimage to Yorba Linda one day, the former colleague asked excitedly:

“Are you a conservative?”

No, sir. No I’m not. I’m Australian, after all.

Do conservatives even claim Nixon as one of their own any more?

SPECULATION 2

Benjamin Thomas:

Besides the fact that he was a great bowler?

He’s looking a lot more informal than I gathered; I thought he always bowled in a tie.

But then, I haven’t seen The Big Lebowski yet, where the first pic features.

SPECULATION 3

I’ve started following Tom Ramsay as an echo-chamber antidote, on the recommendation of Clarissa Lohr. I A2A’d him as an icebreaker.

I might need to revisit my choice of icebreakers.

Well this is the first I’ve heard of this particular, um, passion. So I am completely going out on half a limb with this A2A…

Are you the son of Deep Throat? ;P

To the best of my knowledge, I am not related to Mark Felt.

Now, if all the theories are wrong, and Stavros Nicholas was in fact taking time off from running a fish & chip shop in Launceston, Tasmania to meet Bernstein & Woodward in some garage in DC, well, I admire his stamina…

SPECULATION 4

Uri Granta has done his research, bringing up the Greek angles of Spiro Agnew, and the infamous moneybags Tom Pappas (Τομ Πάπας – Βικιπαίδεια; it is so… weird reading about him in the Greek Wikipedia).

Uri has also done his research with the Nixon–Whitlam collision course, a subject I am infuriated that I know less about than I should.

Uri’s third para of course is the right answer, and I’ll come back to that.

SPECULATION 5

Michaelis Maus, welcome to my nightmare. Mwa. Ha. Ha. And thank you for chiming in!

Your vid was by Flight of the Conchords. I definitely should put them on the list, but alas, I stopped consuming popular culture a long time ago. But bless you for including them in your answer. God they’re good. I’ll delight in taking credit for them, as all Australians do with all good things that come out of New Zealand.

Dr Nick appreciates that Michaelis is, to use an infantilising classification scheme, Chaotic Neutral (Alignment (Dungeons & Dragons)), which is why Tricky Dick is a “a real, consistent nihilist after [his] own heart”. (He is also grateful that Michaelis has remembered his little “I’m arrogant enough to demand to be addressed as Dr” aside!) OTOH, I’m Lawful Good, with the Lawful exceeding Good—so much so, that I consciously try to force myself to be Lawful Neutral, all the time.

If you get my meaning.

Dr. Nick, to that effect, seems to appreciate the complexities of oft-caricatured humans.

Yes, Michaelis. You get my meaning. In fact, my first glance reaction was “yeah, but it’s more than that”; but come to think of it, reading your answer again, no, it was that.

Let me though trace my own journey of Nixon appreciation.

STAGE 0

I was 3 during Watergate, and living in Launceston, Tasmania. Little knowing that my dad was couriering information to Bernstein and Woodward, apparently.

My earliest political memory of anything involved Reagan. So Nixon is ancient history to me, in a time that already had the Iran-Contra affair. I did not experience the visceral sense of betrayal that Americans did with Watergate; I took it as given.

So Nixon does not viscerally offend me, the way it might someone who lived through his fall.

What I knew about Nixon until I was 17 was Watergate, and he’d occasionally show up on TV as a pundit. That was it.

STAGE 1

Stage 1 was hearing the premiere on the radio of Nixon in China in 1988. Nixon in China is an amazing opera, with an amazing libretto, that has stood the test of time.

Thing is, though, that the composer and librettist were both stereotypical Berkeley lefties, so they made a point of overcompensating in their depiction of Nixon. They did not want to make him a villain, so they tried to make him a hero. They didn’t pull it off: the real hero of the piece is Zhou En-Lai.

You see a Nixon comically out of depth in the opera, but also a Nixon strategising and reminiscing and nervous and genuinely hopeful. What you see only in passing, though, is the darkness in Nixon; just a couple of minutes, really—“The rats begin to chew the sheets” in the first scene, “Some men you cannot satisfy” in the last. It’s an interesting depiction, but a little too positive to be fascinating.

STAGE 2

1995, I caught Oliver Stone’s Nixon (film) on TV.

That’s what did it.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are your favorite movies and why?

I looked high and low for the DVD for years afterwards. Over a decade in fact.

Yes, it’s fictionalised and psychobabblised and operatic and conspiracy-theorised. And having read a lot of Nixoniana since, I still think that artistically, it is essentially true. It’s not a documentary, but that’s not what it needed to be.

STAGE 3

Stage 3 was getting together with another Nixon fan. Our bonding over Nixon is mentioned in my answer above. One of Tamar’s first presents to me was Volume I of Ambrose’s biography; and propelled by it, I’ve ended up reading most of Melbourne University’s holdings on Nixon.

Nick Nicholas, why are you so fascinated with Nixon?

He was a multi-faceted, complex man.

• Was the smartest man in decades in the White House. And turned the White House into a protection racket, with the dumbest enforcers imaginable.
• Used politics as a cudgel, but genuinely thought he was doing good for the world.
• Did good for the world with detente and China, but also did evil for the world with using SALT as a political football, and undermining Johnson on ending Vietnam.
• Had genuine outreach with Martin Luther King as a Vice President, but invented the Southern Strategy.
• Did great things for Native Americans—by accident, because that was Ehrlichman’s pet project, not his; and Ehrlichman was on his side, so of course he’d defend him against Congress.
• Nursed lifelong paranoias against the elite, but the elite really was out to get him, because of the excesses his paranoia caused.

He had a bushelful of hamartias, tragic flaws. The tragic hero doesn’t have to be Good. He just has to have potential to be better than his hamartias allow.

And I have the luxury of regarding Nixon from a distance, as a tragically flawed president, rather than as a visceral offence to my own polity and founding myths. Because I was 3 during Watergate, and living in Launceston, Tasmania.

Originally buried in a comment at https://www.quora.com/Was-it-app…

In response to:

Well, if you believe what the cast of Hamilton did was appropriate, then you’d be okay that if henceforth every theatrical performance would include the cast’s comments on the political scene.

… When Aristophanes invented comedy? That’s exactly what he did. Using the chorus to do so. That included making fun of Athenian massacres during wartime. And I’m sure people squirmed then.

If it’s a political play (and of course Hamilton is), of course that’s legitimate. And it’s just as legitimate from the right as the left.