Category: Uncategorized

The in-universe explanation (to treat Greek mythology like fantasy fiction, and that’s not that absurd really) is

He was renamed Heracles [“glory of Hera”] in an unsuccessful attempt to mollify Hera. (Heracles – Wikipedia)

Stepping behind the curtain, in his monograph on Greek religion (p. 322), Walter Burkert says the name might be a coincidence; but he thinks it likelier that Heracles being subject to Eurysthenes and his protector goddess Hera, and the multiple instances where Heracles cross-dressed, point to a hero whose very point was that he could fall from being the son of Zeus to being disempowered (oppressed by a female goddess, cross-dressing like a woman).

Back when I was lecturing, I made a consistent effort to be the weirdest thing in the room. If I was running late, I would boom the opening words of my lecture while walking down the corridor into the theatre. I would walk into lecture drinking a Slurpee, and remind students that no eating or drinking was allowed in the theatre. I would reuse my Introduction To Linguistics slides from the previous year, and point out that the essential nature of human language had not altered significantly in the past 12 months. I would intersperse my lecture with random dated pop culture references from the 90s and dad jokes. I opened my first lecture on historical linguistics in Old English. I paced the room, gesticulating and expostulating.

Of course you are not surprised to read this.

I was something of an acquired taste, but I had a mature age student point out to me that during my lectures, you could hear a pin drop.

As a result, and being transfixed by my own antics, I didn’t notice any weird happenings among the students. I had colleagues that did. One colleague noted the incongruity between the couple taking notes above the desk, and what their hands were doing to each other below the desk.

Alas, I was absent the day my peers brought a stripper to scare off the curmudgeonly lecturer during his final Fortran lecture. (It didn’t work. “You are not a student enrolled in this course! Please leave!”) I was there, however, when a group of students performed the Dutch national anthem for our Dutch computer architecture lecture, and the Danish national anthem for our Danish operating systems lecturer.

I was in fact the soloist.

Wilhelmus van Nassouwe ben ik, van Duitsen bloed….

• Nick Nicholas’ answer to Did Quora add emoji support?
• Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why doesn’t Quora allow the use of emoticons, when it would make the site more interactive?
• Evgeniy Pavlov’s answer to Why doesn’t Quora allow the use of emoticons, when it would make the site more interactive?

Appropriateness is always relative. We might like to think that there are universal norms applicable to all people and all situations. It simply does not work like that.

Profanity signals intimacy, because it presupposes a level of trust that the addressee will not take offence, and it situates the interlocutors as both being rebels against outsider norms of propriety, which signals solidarity. The same reasoning applies to the old taboos on sex and scatology, and the new taboos on race and sexuality.

If a language is agglutinative, or has a halfway decent derivational morphology, you can keep making up words based on other words for as long as you like, and those words will be perfectly acceptable. So there is not much of a limit.

There is a limit in how many building blocks of words (morphemes) someone can retain, and those morphemes will correspond to the vocabulary of someone speaking a purely isolating language. (Spoken Chinese isn’t as pure about this as it likes to think it is. Classical Chinese is, but classical Chinese is clearly heavily stylised.)

So, to turn this question into a question somewhat more clearly related to the limitations of human linguistic processing: how many characters can a Chinese speaker retain? Or, how big is the vocabulary of the average English speaker? (which is somewhat close to this, though English derivational morphology is still productive).

The answer for an individual is in the order of magnitude of 10,000. For a contemporary language with a wide range of specialist vocabularies, you are ranging across the vocabulary of all members of the speech community. That means you add one order of magnitude to the size of the available stock of morphemes; you don’t add two.

Quora, once again, is contradictory about this. Jay Wacker, consider this feedback.

• Quora’s answer to Does content on Quora need to be written in English?

Quora requires that content on English Quora (quora.com) be written in English.

Content includes blogs.

• Quora’s answer to Does Quora enforce its moderation policies on blog content and comments?

Blogs that have content primarily in a language other than English should not attach English topics to the blog.

This presupposes that blogs can be in languages other than English.

The former answer is newer, so I presume it takes priority; the latter answer hasn’t been updated in three years.

Xianhang Zhang’s answer to What are some of the basic “Community Management 101” mistakes that Quora has made? (written 2010, updated 2013):

• Inadequate information architecture of the existing documented procedures. Dogfooding is all well and good but Quora deciding to put its charter documents in the same Q&A system as everything else means that they’re fragmented and may as well not exist for new users.

And, I’ll add, difficult to keep up to date and consistent. As Elliot Mason can attest (Beware of the Leopard).

Nicole Livingstone: Nicole Dawn Livingstone, OAM (born 24 June 1971) is an Australian former competitive swimmer, Olympic silver medallist, and a television sports commentator and radio presenter. Livingstone competed for Australia in three summer Olympics – 1988, 1992, and 1996 – winning both individual and team medals.

NICOLE LIVINGSTONE O.A.M.

Nicole Livingstone, or, as we imaginatively call her at the time, “Dead Rock”, was in my class for a year when I was 13. Outside of the rarefied circles of Quora and Klingon linguistics, she is more famous than me.

Booooo…

Oh, what was my impression of her? Let’s just say, the onset of puberty is not a time that brings out the best in anyone. And in the unlikely event she remembers me, she’d say the same about me.

Quora is not as clear about this as it should be (of course), but:

• What is Quora’s “Be Nice, Be Respectful” policy? indicates that BNBR applies to answers, comments, and messages.
• Quora’s answer to Does Quora enforce its moderation policies on blog content and comments? indicates that a more *diluted* version of BNBR applies to blogs:

Blogs on Quora are generally unmoderated. Most policies that apply to question-and-answer pages do not apply to blogs.

That includes the policy against memes.

1. Blogs whose primary purpose is to attack, insult, and/or derogatorily label people are not allowed.

• In assessing whether a blog violates this rule, we will evaluate the blog’s content (if the blog is public), photo, title, and description. We may also take into account how much other value there is on the blog.

[…]

2. Blogs which aren’t aimed at attacking people but still have a purpose of attacking content will no longer generate notifications or repost trackbacks.

If the memes target content rather than people, Quora can limdist them, but they won’t necessarily ban them. Presumably that applies to blogs such as Why, Booty?, which do in fact primarily exist to “attack” (make fun of) content (questions), and thus would normally violate BNBR.

In one of his books about the historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan wrote something like, “it is very difficult for us now to conceive how indifferent and peremptory the Romans were in dealing with Jesus.” There was likely no washing of hands, nor any ecce homo. The most he would have gotten was, “Insurrection? The Cross! Next!”

The trolls and spammers and malcontents that routinely get banned after a couple of posts? Part of the detritus that comes with managing any online forum. They waste as much emotion on them, as King Lear’s gods wasted on flies. The same, for that matter, as the most popular Quorans waste on the people they block.

Things should be different for valuable members of the community, that have a lot to offer, and that the staff have gotten to know personally. I have been assured by former community admins that they debated long and hard before banning prominent users. I have been assured by users that Quora employees have been distraught at some of the bans they were forced to make.

I do not have confidence that the current apparent structure of bots and subcontractors that seem to be handling the bulk of Moderation work have that level of engagement, either emotionally or intellectually, with their tasks.

In theory, a bot or subcontractor should show neither fear nor favour, neither love nor hate, which should give their decisions more fairness at least of a robotic sort (which ignores context and wisdom). In practice, reporting is not fairly targeted, and there’s a few Old Planters who don’t seem to be targeted enough; so that doesn’t work out.

Quora users need to live in readiness for the prospect of being banned, and email, forums, and social media allow them to stay in touch after being banned. Myself, I have stayed in occasional touch with Sophie Dockx and Laura Hale (although Laura has left Quora rather than being banned), and I have had a couple of exchanges with Marcia Buckie.

All of them, I think it is fair to say, have had to make an adjustment to being off Quora. And all of them are now getting on with their lives.