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… No, actually. Given the mixed record of TWs, their indebtedness to Quora, and the crimps that it would put on Dimitris [ Dimitris Almyrantis ], the *last* thing I would want is for him to be a TW.
Λάμπε τρελό διαμάντι. 🙂
The Greek, btw, is: “Shine on you crazy diamond.”
So responding to an answer by Dimitris about why he isn’t getting the Quill, and agreeing with him that he shouldn’t compromise how he writes to get the Quill, IS INSULTING HIM?!!
It’s not Dimitris that I seek to insult. Believe me.
Modern Greek has nasal Sandhi. That means that following a word ending in /n/, any voiceless stop is voiced. (And in the case of /ks/ and /ps/, so is the following /s/.) The /n/ in turn assimilates in place of articulation to what follows.
So:
patera “father”, san patera [sam batera] “like a father”
keo “I burn”, ðen keo [ðeŋ ɡeo] “I don’t burn”
psixi “soul”, stin psixi [stim bziçi] “to the soul”
kseno “stranger”, ton kseno [toŋ ɡzeno] “the stranger”
Of course, we don’t have transcripts by Plato of chats with Socrates, we have dialogues he made up. But Socrates is constantly addressed in Plato’s dialogues as “O Socrates” (ὦ Σώκρατες), with monotonous regularity—over 1200 times in the works of Plato. Socrates in turn addresses his trollees (er, interlocutors) as “O partner” or “o good man” (ὦ ἑταῖρε, ὠγαθέ).
I didn’t get to know my paternal grandparents well; I met my grandfather only once, my grandmother twice. My grandmother was somewhat vague by the time I met her, and I had real trouble with her dialect. My grandfather was vaguely feared, but I couldn’t particularly see why at eight years of age; I hadn’t been brought up in his hardscrabble household, after all.
My maternal grandparents, I got to know well. My grandfather was proud, unsmiling, stern. He was the village beadle, and a denizen of good standing in the community. He was descended from Sfakia, the southwest of the island, where people pursue vendettas and dress in permanent black, and think dancing beneath them. He was slightly out of place in the village in easternmost Crete, where people are relaxed and docile, and do not shoot firearms into the air at weddings. He ran a cafe in the upper village, before my time; I could not understand how—the kafedzis is supposed to be the life of the party.
He wasn’t cold, as such, although perhaps more affectionate to infants than to children. But critical, and very concerned with public perception. When I’d goof off as a teenager, he’d scowl Λίγη σοβαρότης δε βλάφτει. “A bit of seriousness wouldn’t do you any harm.”
He often said that if he was ever debilitated, they should give him rat poison: he was too proud a man to want to go without command of his faculties. He was felled by two strokes, and lived out his final days with no faculties, and no rat poison. He deserved a better end than that.
My grandmother was—is—as cheerful as my grandfather was stern, and as kindly as he was critical. She’d laugh a lot, with a gentle chuckle, and often without much obvious cause. She’d still get annoyed about things, often including me goofing off. But her annoyance never lasted long.
She’s still going at 94, although not quite there as much as she was. Then again, she’s more there than her children allow. When my wife and I visited her, she asked my wife’s name, and when she was trying to pronounce “Tamar”, my uncle jumped in and hollered “Maria! Her name’s Maria!” (A generation of Albanian migrants can testify to Greeks refusing to learn foreign names.) My grandmother chuckled, “Well, I guess I’ll call you Maria then.” In fact, here’s the footage:
Quora design philosophy, such as it is, is antithetical to any notion of user options. So you can discount that.
Quora has a follower network. Answers show up in people’s feeds, from writers they like (for whatever reason), divorced from the context of other answers to the same question; and people are usually not strongly enough motivated to open up a tab and see what anyone else had to say. If people like a writer, they will upvote their stuff. If people like a writer because of their personality and style, and aren’t extremely interested in the question itself, they won’t look at other answers and weigh them up.
I mean, *I* do. But I might do it once every 20 or 30 items in my feed. How often do you?
So yes, Quora has cultivated a culture of popular writers, because (despite its embarrassment over it) it does have a social network underlying it. And without the social network, it wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near the level of engagement, or free feedback and tagging, that it does. It’s a price to be paid.
It could make it slightly easier to access alternate answers to the same question, I guess, as some sort of preview in the feed. But then again, how many people would click through to those alternates?