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.

Originally Answered:

How can you describe the personality of the Greeks?

Noone’s biting?

InB4 “You can’t stereotype all Greeks”, &c &c

Mercurial. Impulsive.

There’s an apocryphal Turkish saying (which in fact, I’ve only found in Greek sources—but then again, I haven’t asked Quora): Gâvurun/Yunanın akili sonradan geliyor. Του Ρωμιού η γνώση ύστερα έρχεται. A Greek’s common sense comes later.

Passionate. Like to yell at each other as a performance piece. Like to disagree for the fun of it. The saying goes “Where there are two Greeks, there are three opinions”. (It’s a saying that Jews also lay claim to.)

Their sense of honour (amour propre: How do I translate the Greek word filotimo?) is a double-edged sword: it makes them generous to a fault, but also very touchy.

Very much about the collective and the social ritual, like many recently traditional societies. Operate through positive politeness (What are the negative and positive politeness strategies?) No interest in “personal space”.

Nationalistic, but mistrustful of authority and of notions of the common good. Enterprising and street-smart (or at least, they used to be). Blame malicious outside forces by default, rather than admit problems closer to home.

*shrug* That’s a start.

Ah, Dimitris. Yoruba oga “boss” vs Ottoman Turkish ağa [aɣa, now aː] Agha (Ottoman Empire) “an honorific title for a civilian or military officer” < Old Turkic aqa “elder brother”.

Three letter word, final vowel the same, consonant similar, meanings in the same ballpark.

You can see why I’m not impressed. Islam was shared between Turkey and Nigeria, sure, but this was a specifically Ottoman title, and the cultural traffic just wasn’t there.

Besides, when a woman wants to flatter her mate in Greece, and call him “boss” and bring him his slippers and fulfil his patriarchal fantasies, she doesn’t call him “my agha”.

She calls him “my Pasha”. Pashas outranked aghas, after all.

What’s that I hear? Pshaw?

Why yes. Bashaw was an early English rendering of Pasha.

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And, as a desultory attempt to answer the question as stated:

Here in Australia, I get hubbo from my wife. Partaking in the age-old tension between the two Australian hypocoristics, –o and –ie. Hubby is far more widespread throughout English.

Qo’noS, the Klingon home planet, uses loDnal. We know loD is ‘man’.

In Esperantujo, it’s edzo. A back formation from edzino “wife”, itself a reanalysis of the Litvak Yiddish pronounciation of the the suffix in Prinz-essin.

In Lojbanistan, it’s speni “spouse”. You can specify the gender as nakspe “male spouse”; I doubt most Lojbanists bother.

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.