Three candidates.

Lexical aspect: the distinction between achievement, accomplishment, activity and state it took from Vendler. It’s not inherently inscrutable, but rattling off Vendler’s nomenclature is not the way to make people understand it.

The shades of difference between abstractors: nu, du’u, sedu’u, ka, su’u. The distinctions are real, but they are more confusing, and natural languages occult those distinctions behind the matrix predicate class or less granular complement markers.

And the articles. They were confusing before; they got revised; they’re still confusing. They may not be wrong, but they are quite alien.

Closest I can think of is Hermes, who was a trickster and patron of Thieves. Ground zero for Hermes the trickster (Dolios) seems to have been the myth of how he stole Apollo’s oxen: The Little Rascal: Hermes

Most metaphors, we’d like to assume, were new once. (Likely not all of them: cognitive metaphor is tied up with cognition.)

Some new metaphors, or figurative speech, or just plain collocations, become popular. Others do not.

Some of those popular collocations become so popular, they become entirely conventional and characteristic of a genre. And in most cultures, that’s actually a good thing. These are familiar, comforting signals. They are shortcuts to thinking, for the speaker and the reader both. They are not surprising or vivid or thought provoking, which they may well have been once; but that’s ok.

However there are genres, and more importantly cultures, in which ongoing vividness and punchiness are valued more than familiarity and conventionality. Those are the genres and cultures that decry cliches. And when a particular expression becomes conventional and familiar, they value seeking out other expressions, that are not yet conventional and familiar.

Remember: most cliches started out as novel.

Why are some words clichéd? Because in those genres, they have become the victims of their own success.

What I’ve used is “OP here” or “I’m the OP”. I want to use a succinct rather than a discursive form.

McKayla Kennedy says you don’t need to signal that you’ve answered your own question, because the question is community property.

But I do signal, at least some times, that I’ve answered my question, because it pertains to the answer (which is mine) not the question. It flags to readers that my answer is a self-answer, because:

• at least for some people it can make them wary of the answer (it contains unexpressed presuppositions, it’s self-promotion)
• I’m flagging that the answer is intended as a conversation-starter—I actually am pushing along a request for people to disagree with me.

That’s just me, of course.

Thx4A2A, Sofia. No idea why you asked, which makes it all the more flattering.

I have a high tolerance of repetition in music in general.

OTOH, I am old, I am old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled; so I know very little of music after 1995. You are young, Sofia; one day you will understand.

(You know that horrifying moment when you realise you’ve turned into your dad? Yeah. «Έχεις πολλάάάάά να μάθεις ακόμα»: “Son, you’ve got a lot to learn…”)

But of recent songs, I think Uptown Funk counts as something I could listen to on loop for hours. Mostly, of course, because it sounds like the music I grew up with.

Make a dragon wanna retire, man.

In fact, I think I’ll put it on loop now…

Slower than the Mengelberg Andy Anderson linked to, faster than Bernstein’s dirge.

Mahler may have played it that fast, but geez, what does the author know about his own text?

As Curtis Lindsay said, it is meant to be a song, not the slow-mo ringing of the spheres. Embarrassingly in fact Mahler did make lyrics for it, as a love song to Yoko Ono… er, Alma Mahler.

In general though, and with the exception of this instance, Mahler’s own advice holds when it comes to conducting. When you sense the audience is getting restless—go slower. There’s a lot going on in Mahler: taking the time to let it play out is normally good advice.

It’s just that in the case of the Adagietto, there’s somewhat less going on. It doesn’t need that much time to play out.

The 8th is a barrage and a tour de force. And it has some amazing moments.

But… IMHO you’re on to something there. It is something of a step backwards for Mahler. It is not less competent, but it is less personal, and musically more conservative than what he did before or after. I love the relentless first movement, which is Mahler’s kind-of Mass, and is loud and energetic enough to match anything else he did in that vein. (Hostem Repellas!) The second movement, which is his kind-of Opera, relies on Goethe for its structure rather than internal logic, and I think it sags.

And some of his aesthetics in this piece has not survived the test of time, where I think most have. The harmonium and the whole Ewig Weibliche thing is too much of the 19th century.

Which makes a better ambassador, a political appointee or career diplomat? has an answer from the late John Burgess—but not, I must say, a very informative answer.

The answer, I would have to assume, is no. The ambassador may well be a political appointee, and therefore likely a figurehead. Maybe less so for Australian political appointees, who tend to be ex-politicians, than for the US, who tend to be donors. Politics is at least somewhat relevant experience.

That does not imply that the rest of the staff in the embassy are decorative, and that all decisions are taken centrally in the State Department/Foreign Ministry.

I refer you to:

• I want to add a new language to Google Translate. How do I do that?
• What are Google Translate requirements and criteria to add new language into the list of translated languages?
• How do I add malayalam language to Google translate for translating from english to malayalam?

It’s a straight-out prioritisation game, and there are lots of reasons why Karen would be down the list.

• Not a majority language of a country or state (so you can’t do the lobbying that e.g. Mongolian did)
• Not a majority language of a country or state (so it’s simply not as pressing: Karen speakers with access to computers are likely already going to know Burmese)
• Not a majority language of a country or state (so it is unlikely to have generated an extensive corpus of bilingual text—without which, nothing is possible for Google Translate)

Now, Google can make exceptions, as languages take its fancy; Haitian Creole was one, for example, and an answer indicates that Google made a point of building the necessary bilingual resources. But (a) that’s for Google to build, not you, and (b) Google is going to prioritise by need, and there are a lot of unsupported languages with ten times the speakers: 8 Surprising Languages Not on Google Translate – K International

It’s an unsympathetic answer I know. I think the best you can do is contribute to the online presence of Karen, including getting involved with Drum Publications—so that there is more of a Karen corpus text. And building bilingual corpora is critical: translate things from English, and put them online. Without these, there’s no real point asking Google Translate for anything.

Online Unicode support for even Burmese was extremely late, so there is surely ground to be made up for Burmese-script Karen online.

Originally Answered:

How do I get Quora to stop telling me when people upvote something I already upvoted?

Originally Answered: How do I get Quora to stop telling me when people upvote something I already upvoted?

There is a saying here in Melbourne.

If you don’t like the weather… wait five minutes.

Any implications about the stability of Quora’s UI are deliberate.