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.

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.

People pretty universally say the 7th is crap. I think the reason is only the last movement.

The first four movements are great. They are quite not as great as the 5th or 6th, which seems to say what they say better. In fact, each of the first three movements seems to be quite close to the corresponding movement in the 6th symphony, and to be outdone by it. But the middle movements are still all wonderful, and the 4th movement has a delightful urbane wistfulness about it, much more human-scaled than the Adagietto of the 5th. (It is after all meant to be scene-painting a night stroll around Vienna.)

It falls down in the last movement. Exegetes say that it’s deliberately meant to be bathetic, that Mahler is poking fun at the carefree style of the Strausses, just as Shakespeare made the problem comedies problematic, and Mahler himself made the finale of the 5th a study in anticlimax.

I buy it for the 5th. I don’t buy it for the 7th. It does sound to me like someone who’s trying to have a happy ending and failing; it does not sound to me like someone who’s doing that on purpose, to make a larger point.

Thx4A2A, Linda.

I’ll go with the painting too. Even if I’m not a visual arts kind of guy.

I won’t do a long justification of that; others have, pro and con, mostly jocular.

Some have been less jocular. But you know what? Doodles do matter.

And even though Tom Groves meant it jocularly, well, when he says:

People die all the time, You can’t save ’em all. The real world is not like Pokemon.

… he’s not wrong.

It’s from a very different context, but see Yannis Makriyannis quote from Nick Nicholas’ answer to Did Greeks in the Ottoman age feel Greek or Roman? Why was Greek identity chosen and not Roman when fighting for independence?

I had two fine statues, a woman and a prince, intact—you could see the veins on them, that’s how perfect they were. Some soldiers had taken them and they were going to sell them to some Europeans, for a thousand thalers. I went over, I took the soldiers aside, and spoke to them. “These statues, even if they give you ten thousand thalers, don’t you stoop to letting them be taken out of our country. These are what we fought for.”

EDIT: Oh, and to encapsulate some other points made by Tom and Linda?

How many people now mourn Morosini blowing up the Parthenon?

How many people now mourn the soldiers Morosini blew up along with the Parthenon?