Category: Uncategorized

In my “I Love Youse All” series of blog posts about favourite Quorans (and I’m due to add to them), I sometimes use nicknames as well as in-jokes, and I explain them in the Clavis Quoristarum Praeclarorum series:

• Clavis Quoristarum praeclarorum #1 by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile
• Clavis Quoristarum praeclarorum #2 by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile
• Clavis Quoristarum praeclararum #3 by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile
• Clavis Quoristarum praeclarorum #4 by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile

There aren’t that many nicknames, but the nicknames I use, stick.

• Michael Masiello is The Magister (“the teacher, the Master”).
• Habib Fanny is Habib le toubib (“Habib the medico”).
• Mohammed Khateeb Kamran is Hansolophontes (“Hans Solo Slayer”—he spoiled a plot point about Hans Solo here once).
• Gigi J Wolf is La Gigi. (Die Kat tells me that she came up with La Gigi first.)
• Tracey Bryan is Trace.
• Pegah Esmaili (banned) is canım (“My soul”—term of endearment at odds with her demeanour).
• Kelley Spartiatis is (very occasionally) Madonna (her actual Greek name means Maiden-Voiced; so she sounds Like A Virgin).
• Josephine Stefani is my Spirit Sister (because we both have Armenian partners. Which one toasts using spirits. Ararat Brandy, to be exact.)
• Victoria Weaver is Comrade Victoria or Grazhdanka Viktoria (depending on how commie I’m feeling; “Grazhdanka” is Russian for “Citizen”).

I’ve pointed a typo in Stephanopoulos’ name to Irene Colthurst in her bio, and she did not immediately excoriate me. 🙂 Yes, it’s a confrontational tactic, but not everyone will take offence.

A less risky strategy is private message, if the user has them enabled.

A really roundabout way if they don’t, as you point out, is to find a mutual friend—someone they follow who you can message, and get them to let them know.

But I gotta say, I would not consider answer commenting to point out a typo rude, as long as your comment is appropriately deferential…

Yes. It was never written unaccented, because it was never treated as a clitic. On the other hand, the unstressed variant κι was indeed never accented.

There are several online dictionaries of emoji meanings.

The intended meaning of [math]unicode{x1f60B}[/math] is “Face Savouring Delicious Food”, which is the Unicode name of the emoji.

U0001f60b Face Savouring Delicious Food Emoji (Emojipedia) offers “Used to indicate a silly happiness; goofy; hungry.”

U0001f60b (Urban Dictionary) offers “thirsty; desperate”

Face Savouring Delicious Food Emoji (Emojibase) notes that :yum: is used in some phones as an abbreviation.

A Google perusal suggests that the “food” association is prevalent.

I’m not the starstruck type normally, and I’ve grown both more confident and more jaded the longer I’m on here. I did PM “Thank you for following me!… But why?” to a few people in my time: Kate Scott, Jeremy Markeith Thompson, Sabrina Deep, Buster Smith.

Early on, I was proud to get a comment from Dan Holliday, but my answer was as courteous to him as if he’d had two followers. I may very occasionally still say I appreciate the attention, in my response to a famous Quoran, but I think the more jaded I get, the less it registers; I tend to appreciate reactions equally by people I don’t know, and more by people I do. 🙂

In Greece, it’s not particularly difficult to find all the works of Kazantzakis in any middling bookstore; and bless you for mentioning the Terza Rimas, that I have a lot of affection for.

In the Anglosphere, a university with a Modern Greek teaching program will have them. A university that used to have a Modern Greek teaching program, like the University of Melbourne, will have banished them to storage.

From Nikos Kazantzakis – Wikipedia, I see a lot of translations of the more obscure works have appeared in very obscure places—literary journals in the 1970s, limited edition runs of 140. Neither Julian nor the Terza Rimas have been translated, although the Terza Rima I use as one of my email .sigs has been:

• Christ (poetry), translated by Kimon Friar, “Journal of Hellenic Diaspora” (JHD) 10, No. 4 (Winter 1983), pp. 47–51 (60).

You can download that issue at: Issues 1-2, 3, 4

The time frame for appeals, we are told, is two weeks. See e.g.

• Sierra Spaulding’s answer to How long does it take for Quora to un-collapse an answer?
• McKayla Kennedy’s answer to How long do Quora moderators take to respond to appeals and reported issues?
• Laura Hale’s answer to How long does Quora take to respond to an appeal to anonymity suspension?
• Laura Hale’s answer to How long should I expect to wait for a response from Quora moderation?

Any unbans I have seen have been within that timeframe.

Brooke was banned two weeks ago.

I doubt it.

None of the answers satisfy me, though Logan R. Kearsley’s is by far the closest to satisfying me.

EDIT: Uri Granta’s answer satisfies me more than mine. Go read that.

---

There is a colloquial register in English, in which the first person subject is omitted routinely. It predates social media; see, for example the Beatles’ A Day in the Life. The bits Lennon wrote use the pronoun; the middle section McCartney wrote skips it:

Woke up, fell out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup,
And looking up I noticed I was late.
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke,
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream

But contra Logan, I don’t think this is just spoken English. I think this is a particular narrative register of spoken English—it’s a conventionalised way of telling stories, in a punchy way. I don’t think you’ll find it in different kinds of speech, such as say persuasive speech or instructional speech.

Jimmy Chapel

He explains in his profile bio why he left. He was a social conservative and a conservative catholic, but he wasn’t trolling or abusive, so the reason for which he left are kinda sad.

This is (a) very old and (b) profane. Hope it’s what you’re looking for, Vangeli. Whether or not it’s what you’re looking for, it’s what you’re getting from me.

The Greeks got hold of the alphabet in the early 8th century BC. If you’re studying the history of the Greek alphabet, as I’ve done, you will inevitably come across the graffiti found in 1898, near the Thera gymnasium. Dating from the late 8th century BC, they use a version of the Greek alphabet so archaic, it lacks not only an omega, but even a phi: the /pʰ/ sound was written out just as it was by the Romans, as a pi followed by a Heta.

This particular metrical inscription captured my interest (Inscriptiones Graecae xii 3.537 = Iambica Adespota 29Aa):

ΝΑΙΤΟΝΔΕΛΠΗΙΝΙΟΝΕΚΡΙΜΟ
ΝΤΕΔΕΟΙΠΗΕΠΑΙΔΑΒΑΘΥΚΛΕΟΣΑΔΕΛΠΗΕΟ

If you clean it up, introduce word spaces, and guess which vowels were meant to be long, you get:

ναι τον Δελπ⊢ινιον ε̣ Κριμο̄ν
τε̄δε ο̄ιπ⊢ε παιδα, Βαθυκλεος αδελπ⊢εο[ν]

And if you use conventional Greek orthography:

ναὶ <μὰ> τὸν Δελφίνιον,
ἦ Κρίμων τῆδε ᾦφε παῖδα Βαθυκλέος, ἀδελφεόν.

“Truly, by the Delphic Apollo, here have I, Crimon, something the son of Bathycles, brother of…”

So, what was written down as oiphe, with a <p> and an <h>, is indeed ɔ́ːipʰe… Ok, so what’s the something?

At the time I read this, I had just got hold of the source code of the Perseus Project’s morphological analyser, Morpheus. I typed the word in…

… and got bupkis. I got bupkis, even though the verb ᾦφε belongs to was included in the Morpheus lexical database. The catch is that the verb is on the obscure side with regard to the Classical canon; so it had not been entered manually: it had been automatically extracted from LSJ. And the extraction (at the time) was so poor, that list of verbs was just ignored when the source code was compiled.

That discovery set me on the path to improving Morpheus over the next 12 years, for use in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, until my contract was not renewed last year; on which see The Decalogue of Nick #2.

But… I’m getting off the topic. That ᾦφε verb, it turns out, is the past tense of οἴφω. And what does οἴφω mean?

If you look it up in the Victorian-era LSJ dictionary, you will get a Victorian-era definition:

οἴφω, Dor. = ὀχεύω I, but only of human beings, τὰν Χελιδονίδα Plu.Pyrrh.28, cf. IG12(3).536 (Thera, vii B. C.), Leg.Gort.2.3; οἰφεῖ, as if from οἰφέω, in prov. ἄριστα χωλὸς οἰ., Mimn.15 Diehl, Com.Adesp.36, Diogenian.2.2. (LSJ)

And… what is this cross-referenced ὀχεύω?

of male animals, cover.

So, oiphō is the Doric for “to cover”, referring to male animals, only oiphō refers specifically to human beings.

There is, of course, a more direct way of glossing the old Doric verb:

“Truly, by the Delphic Apollo, here have I, Crimon, fucked the son of Bathycles, brother of…”

One can debate how obscene the verb actually was. Greek Homosexuality argues that since the word was also used in the Law Code of Gortyn (“oiphō by force” = “rape”), it isn’t meant to be coarse; but it isn’t meant to be as delicate as “cover”, either. (Then again, did profanity work in the same way in Ancient Greek society?) There’s also been fertile debate (see Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece) about whether this situated pederasty in a religious context (invoking the god), or just as commonplace bragging.

But whatever the social interpretation, this is indeed an interesting example of Ancient Greek vernacular.