Category: Uncategorized

I’ve had the opportunity to travel a bit in my time; and because Australians are food snobs, I’ve used the opportunity to sample what the locals eat.

I’ll put down two memorable meals.

The first was in Amsterdam. On my last day there, I opened up my Lonely Planet guide book, flicked past the hoity-toity restaurant recommendations and Argentinian steakhouses and the Indonesian Fusion, went down to the Hotel Amsterdam De Roode Leeuw, and ordered myself some Stamppot.

Shh.

Listen.

Listen closely.

Do you hear a faint popping sound?

That’s the sound of a whole bunch of Dutch minds being blown.

The meal was memorable, because my Dutch waiter at the Red Lion Hotel had the selfsame reaction. He just could not even about the fact that an obvious tourist was chowing down with some Dutch comfort food. The kind of Dutch comfort food, he told me, you go skating across frozen lakes with.

Oh, what did it taste like? Stodgy. Filling. Reassuring. The kind of Dutch comfort food you go skating across frozen lakes with.

(This was my account at the time: Fine Dining In Amsterdam)

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The second memorable meal was in Kadıköy, a hip suburb of Istanbul, where my wife’s cousin lives. We tried to pay her a visit one evening while we were in Istanbul for our honeymoon.

Getting the brand new Marmaray metro under the Bosphorus, from Sultanahmet to Üsküdar, was a seven-minute breeze, even if the subway was congested. The next three hours, not so much: waiting half an hour to get a cab, discovering that no cab drivers in Turkey speak English, being stuck in traffic for an hour, being dumped at the start of Kadıköy ’cause “just walk down a bit, you can’t miss it”, missing it, finding that none of the hip young things lounging around Kadıköy cafés speak English either, realising we had the wrong number for Tamar’s cousin, finding an Internet café so we could Facebook a red alert to Telma, having a generous lounger walk us for another half hour in the dark to the address (without any English)…

Oh, distance of Üsküdar to Kadıköy? 11 km.

It was way past 9 by the time we got to Telma’s. Telma, her husband, her newborn, all had grand plans on entertaining us, and sadly, we’d plain gotten there too late. They had to settle for the local kebab joint: KASSAB.

I asseverate to you, by all that is pure and righteous on this good Earth.

That was the best meat I have had the privilege of eating in all my days in this Vale of Tears.

(The Wagyu steak I had on the weekend comes close, but the Wagyu steak just had divine texture, like an oyster that kept on looping. This meat had spice and punch and character.)

Kaleidoscope yet good honest flavours—familiar from Greece, but with a bunch of twists I hadn’t expected; knock-out firewater; newly met family; casual friendly owners; neighbourly chow-down. It doesn’t get better. It truly doesn’t.

A question first posed 5 years ago.

A Quora UX philosophy that does not prioritise usability. What else can be said? UX is autonomous and reports directly to the CEO; it’s not like the usability conundrums of Quora are accidental, or can be blamed on the mice. Whatever is happening, it’s on purpose.

Mills Baker’s answer to Why should designers work at Quora? is as clear a statement of what the Quora UX philosophy as I’ve ever seen, and… I’m still having a lot of trouble understanding how it motivates what we’ve been seeing here, and how it works against usability.

The Jew’s harp is very widely used; in fact, according to History of the Jew’s Harp, the two continents where it was not indigenous were Africa and Australia. There is a long history of the Jew’s harp being used in the British Isles (The Jews-Harp in Britain and Ireland (SOAS Musicology Series): Michael Wright: 9781472414137: Amazon.com: Books); and inasmuch as Australian folk music is based on Anglo–Celtic music, that’s enough to explain its presence there.

There have been a few proposals for symbolic universal language, most of them taking their inspiration from Chinese ideographic systems.

• Pasigraphy was at the start of the universal language movement: they were akin to universal thesauruses in symbolic form. Rather naive in retrospect.
• Blissymbols was probably the most thorough recent effort, and it has found some unexpected usage since for teaching communication to language-disabled children.
• iConji seems to be some sort of mix of Emoji and dingbats.
• And of course there’s Emoji themselves, which are increasingly being used in communication, though of either a more rebus-like or a less syntactic nature.

There are pros and cons to symbols as a universal language. Some symbols are arguably more iconic or indexical as signs than words, and less arbitrary, so they should be easier to learn. In theory. In practice, the minute you move away from concrete nouns, the signs symbolic languages use look pretty arbitrary; and even if they are conceived of as indexical, the metaphors may not be all that obvious. I’m not convinced the gains in iconicity would really be worth it.

… but Greek Language – A Stack Exchange Proposal has certainly piqued my interest.

Expect plenty of cross-polination between my posts here and there if it gets up. (Unless that’s verboten over there; Stack Exchange I gather is pretty rigid.)

Australians desperately hang on to the small lexical differences between States, as you’ll see here, because otherwise Australian English is ludicrously homogeneous geographically. Variation in Australian English – Wikipedia

The names for different sizes of beer glasses (Australian English vocabulary – Wikipedia) is kind of the counterpart to the renowned Eskimo words for snow. (Yes, the jokes do write themselves.) And there is bizarre State-based variation, just as there was beer parochialism in the days before craft beer.

There used to be a similar diversity of words for uncouth and unsophisticated people (yes, again the jokes do write themselves); but they have all been replaced now by Bogan, which has now also come to be reclaimed as a positive.

Where Australia specialises words about beer glasses, Greece specialises words about souvlaki. A döner kebab is a gyros in the South; in the north it’s a sanduits.

The other shibboleth of Northern vs Southern Greek vocabulary is the word for ‘on the ground’. Northern Greek uses the word kato ‘down’ for ‘on the ground’ as well; Southern Greek has retained khamo, khamu for the latter—earning them the moniker khamudzides ‘Down-On-The-Grounders’ from northerners.

See this post on a recent book about the slang differences between the two, written by Haralambos Metaxas, who is also a contributor to the Greek equivalent of Urban Dictionary, slang.gr

Ain’t – Wikipedia

Ain’t is found throughout the English-speaking world across regions and classes, and is among the most pervasive nonstandard terms in English. It is one of two negation features (the other being the double negative) that are known to appear in all nonstandard English dialects.

Take ain’t instead of am/are not, add the double negative, and you’ve got ain’t no. Neither are features of Standard English; both, alone or in combination, are features of pretty much all nonstandard English.

Of the two, amn’t, aren’t > an’t > ain’t happened in the 17th and 18th century—certainly in time for it to travel everywhere English is spoken; ain’t is first attested in writing in 1749 per Wikipedia. The Double negative was present in Middle English, and in wide use in the 17th century. (“Up to the 18th century, double negatives were used to emphasise negation.”)

From what I’m seeing in Wikipedia, both ain’t and the double negative were attacked at the same time by prescription. But they were English-wide phenomena; their association with African American English is simply because African American English was somewhat less subject to prescription than white variants of the language.

1. Because so many Latin nouns do: Why do so many Latin words end in “-um” or “-us”?
2. Because Latin tended by default to treat place names as normal nouns, and ensure they could be inflected as normal nouns: it linguistically assimilated them if they were not originally Latin.

There’s not much to read, apart from the Greeks’ accounts. The peoples to the north were not literate; the Carthaginians did not do history, and their accounts would have been wiped anyway. The main other source of external accounts I could think of would be Persians; and nothing from the Sassanids survives, though some Persian accounts were based on their accounts. (Roman–Persian Wars – Wikipedia)

As others have mentioned, kath– is a variant of kata as a prepositional prefix to verbs and verbal nouns. The meaning of kata– as a preposition in compounds is captured in Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges:

Down from above (καταπίπτειν fall down), back (καταλείπειν leave behind), against, adversely (καταγιγνώσκειν condemn, decide against, καταφρονεῖν despise), completely (καταπετροῦν stone to death, κατεσθίειν eat up), often with an intensive force that cannot be translated. An intransitive verb when compounded with κατά may become transitive.