Category: Uncategorized

Bridegrooms, Bonfires, and Woodchucks: Folk Etymologies in English. From that link:

• The textbook examples for English are sparrowgrass for asparagus, and bridegroom, which should have been bridegoom. (The word gome for “man” became extinct, so people grabbed the nearest similar word. Now that the noun groom for “horse attendant” has also become extinct, people use groom to mean bridegroom.)
• Apparently cockroach is a folk etymology mangling of cucaracha, and Algonquin otchek became woodchuck.
• A bonfire was originally bonefire; people assumed the bon- is French.
• The change of femelle to female in English was a folk etymology linking it to male.

An example I discovered just this year, because of Quora, is the Greek for toyboy or twink, teknó. It looks like a mis-stressed version of the Ancient Greek téknon “child”, the word with which priests address their parishioners. (Insert your own joke here.)

In fact, it’s from the Romany tiknó, “small (child)”. Kaliarda, the cant of Greek street queens in the 60s, used Romany for its base vocabulary, just as its counterpart Polari for English used Italian. Someone along the line noticed the similarity of tiknó to téknon, and switched the vowel accordingly. (Amusingly, someone also noticed it in 1800: Etymologicon magnum, or Universal etymological dictionary, on a new plan [By W. Whiter].)

… Unless Romany tiknó is derived from téknon itself, of course. But I’m reasonably sure it isn’t: Scandoromani derives it from Sanskrit tīkṣṇa “sharp”.

• The sooner you pronounce the city name the way the locals do, the better. Not MELbin, but MALbin: Salary–celery Merger, a proudly Victorian peculiarity. (Whaddaya mean, New Zuhluhnduhrs do it too?) And never, ever pronounce that <r> in Melbourne. What do you think this is, Melbourne, Florida?
• Never say anything good about Sydney. It’s against the law.
• As others have said, learn to coffee snob. See for example Guide to America | Chaser Guides. The print version has the gem “Every day, Starbucks sells 4 million cups of coffee. And not one of them is any good.”
• Go for weekend drives, down the Mornington Peninsula, up to the hills (towards Mt Dandenong), or down to North Hipsterville Daylesford. Thank me later.
• Maybe get me a latte or something. Strong, no sugar.
• There are divides in Melbourne:
• There is a North Of The River/South Of The River divide. It’s not social, it’s about travel convenience. It’s easy to be in a rut and never venture across the River. Don’t fall for it unless you haven’t bothered to get a car. There’s good things to be experienced both sides of the river.
• I once gave an American linguist a tour of the inner south. It was all new to him: all the Melbourne Uni academics who had hosted him had never taken him further south than St Kilda. ST KILDA!
• There is a West Of The River/East Of The River divide. That one is social, and it’s to do with lack of infrastructure in the West. Which means the West has been historically working-class and aggrieved. Demographic pressure though means that gentrification is happening even in the West; Williamstown is already shmick, and Footscray is now only selectively grotty. (Why yes, I do live East Of The River, why do you ask?)
• There is a Hipster/Burbs divide. That one is real. Do not succumb to it on either side. The inner city is wonderful and vibrant. It’s also smug. And the middle range burbs are no longer a wasteland; there’s nice greenery and good social enclaves and a booming café culture. (The outer burbs… well, yeah. They’re dormitory suburbs. Particularly estates. Berwick’s nice though.)

Never a trivial question from you, eh Michaelis?

Something I’ve actually being discussing at some length with Jennifer Edeburn, to whom I seem to have outsourced my superego. (You’ll have noticed I took a day off of that today, Jennifer?)

Nothing I would not have learned from engaging with humanity in general, if I got out more. But some lessons are always salutary, the more so if you learn them ten times running.

• People are wonderful. Randoms have unfathomable reserves of empathy, kindness, and respect. Which I have drawn on, and which I hope to have reciprocated.
• People are awful. Not just the discernible reprobates, the trolls and the bigots: that’s too easy, that’s too fertile a ground for “but I’m above that”. The smug, the judgemental, the unthinking, the bien-pensant. The cliquish, the reactive, the indignant. That get applauded for it.
• And that at times, that can include me. Not a pleasant learning, but a useful one. To be conscious of it is not enough, but it’s an advance anyway.
• People are complex. You can admire one facet of a person, and find another repulsive; or at least problematic. Which makes evaluating whether they are in or out with you difficult.
• People are duplicitous. Or rather, subtle. I hear reports that a lot of people have been unmasked by anonymity fails, under the new regime. I wouldn’t be chortling about it: who among us does not have things about them they’d rather not be broadcast?
• You, perhaps, Michaelis. But you are a nihilist, after all.
• Oh, and I also wouldn’t be chortling, because “upstanding citizens” too can be embarrassed by privacy fails. And they have further to fall.
• Large organisations are stupid and don’t care about you. However many buffets they lay out for you. A relatively easy thing to learn, and I’m astonished that a critical mass don’t seem to have.
• Large organisations have their own agenda, and that’s no more immoral than you having your own agenda. That takes a bit more getting your head around. As I said towards the end of my coming to terms with it: if Quora’s Moloch, then there’s no use getting angry at a furnace. That’s what furnaces do.
• (I’ve taken to calling it a Wall since. Less… incendiary.)
• Communication is possible with people of good will, who let go of their dogmas. That’s a useful lesson that comes with BNBR self-policing.
• Communication is impossible with people who do not share your postulates about the basics. I can talk politics with communists; I cannot talk politics with libertarians. I can talk theology with the undogmatic, I cannot with the self-righteous. There are limits to BNBR.
• Privilege is real, and so is hegemony, and so is complacency. There’s a reason no revolution ever worked on BNBR.
• There is a place for a salon of the thoughtful and the critical, whether Mountain View intended it thus or not. If that’s an abdication from the pressing urgency on the streets, well, let me have it. If Rome is falling, there are worse things to do in its final days than recline on the couch and discuss pentameters.

Tough question, Habib le toubib: I don’t do heroes, I like my critical faculties about me, and I’ve been jaded for a while. And of course, anyone I’d choose would be morbidly obscure anyway.

…

OK, challenge accepted.

• Hubert Pernot. The underappreciated giant of Modern Greek historical linguistics. Not a polemicist, not a tub-thumper; he just got on with it, from a safe distance in Paris. His three volume monograph on the dialect of Chios is an accidental history of all of Modern Greek. His neogrammarian probity in his grammar of Tsakonian is a work for the ages.

• Giovanni Gabrieli. Author of the music of the spheres, the Canzone e Sonate. Thanks, man. It’s music that makes you proud to be human.

• Stephanos Sahlikis. If you don’t count Jalal ad-Din Rumi, the first poet to rhyme in Greek, rhyming about whores and gambling and doing time, in the 14th century.
• Woah! His poems just got published in Panagiotiakis’ long-awaited posthumous critical edition, in 2015! Why didn’t I know about this?! I’m going to have to have words to the maintainer of the Early Modern Greek blog. Thanks Habib, for helping me discover that!

• Helen Waddell. I’ve already written about my teen crush on her: Nick Nicholas’ answer to If you could take one historical person from history as a lover/date, who would it be and why? “If I had to pick, I’d pick someone with poetry in their blood, an awkward smile, and gentle donnish erudition. Someone like Helen Waddell.”

• Gough Whitlam. Flawed, self-important, chaotic politician (was this guy even Australian?), who built up my country’s pride and dignity, and made my country worthy of the name. Yes, there’s a reason we won’t see his like again. We still owe him.

• Charilaos Trikoupis. Taciturn, reserved, orderly politician (was this guy even Greek?), who presided over reforms and infrastructure and a bankruptcy, and made my country worthy of the name. Yes, there’s a reason we won’t see his like again. We still owe him.

• Theodore Metochites. For writing the most obscurantist overgilded Greek ever in his pseudo-Homeric poems, which posed the greatest challenge I faced in all my time at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. For decreeing that the Ancients left us Mediaeval Greeks nothing to say—in a foreword to 120 essays. For commissioning the marvels of Chora Church, while he was the moneybags-in-charge of the Empire. And for retreating into his own church with dignity, with his books and his sorrow, after he lost everything.

I’m just going to leave this statement in support of Quora made by another user here:

Had everyone behaved themselves, it wouldn’t have come to this.

I’ve edited out my BNBR about it. But statements such as these have led me to blocking users. I can have no discussion with someone whose notion of justice works like this.

Quora had a problem with anonymous content, and has destroyed the village in order to save it. What were they thinking? That this will make the problem go away. And that they will be able to keep the lid on fake accounts.

Which demonstrates again that they are in so much denial about being social media, they refuse to learn anything from social media.

As Talleyrand said: It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

BTW, per details:

1. If you make updates, you’re screwed because you’re no longer anonymous and everything is permanently recorded in the log.

If this is true, Quora is compromising its users’ anonymity without warning. And will richly deserve all the negative publicity it gets for it.

There was no direct contact between Ancient Greeks and China. There were a couple of very limited trade missions between the Roman Empire and China, and from what I remember the information exchange was pretty mangled.

Lots of Chinese was translated into European languages once the Jesuits made contact, led by Matteo Ricci in the 17th century.

But you did not say European, you said Indo-European. The obvious place to look is India. There was clearly translation in the other direction of the Buddhist scriptures, to the extent of the Chinese theorising about translation practice: Chinese translation theory. But the earliest indication I’ve found of the reverse direction is in the 7th century AD:

Translation in China

The most important figure of the first peak of translation in China was the famous monk of the Tang dynasty—Xuan Zang (600-664), who was the main character in A Journey to the West. […]

Xuan Zang was also the first Chinese translator who translated out of Chinese. He translated some of Lao Zi’s (the father of Taoism) works into Sanskrit. He also attempted to translate some other classical Chinese literature for the people of India.

The next indication of translation activity into Indo-European I find is 14th century, under the Pax Mongolica, by Rashid-al-Din Hamadani: (see here). “Among Rashideddin’s other works are four volumes of translations from Chinese into Persian, works that he could not have produced by himself, as well as works on agriculture and medicine that incorporate either translations from Chinese or extensive information on Chinese practice derived from Chinese sources.”

Let me sidestep the substance of the question, which has been addressed well under:

• What’s your view regarding Quora’s new anonymity policy changes (March 2017)?
• How well is the “new anonymity” policy on Quora working at filtering out bad content, as of March 20, 2017?

And let me go to the underlying question: how can Quora make decisions that users disagree with?

Anonymity has been complained about for years.

• It has been complained about, with suggestions for improvement, on Quora, a forum which Quora staff as far as I can tell don’t accept any feedback from. (And please. Evidence to the contrary welcome. Being yelled at in comments by current or former leads does not count.)
• It has been complained about, with suggestions for improvement, on the Facebook and IRL top writer groups, some of which putatively Quora staff do accept feedback from.

What we get is… not necessarily addressing the core concerns around anonymity, such as being able to mute anonymous questions. In fact, I’d like to highlight this exchange:

https://insurgency.quora.com/Wel…

Robert Maxwell : My favorite part of all of this is how Quora’s solution to anonymity abuse was to make anonymous questions and answers even more anonymous.

John Gragson : Supposedly it was to be balanced by more aggressive moderation (“pre-review”, they called it).

Viola Yee : All we really wanted was to block a particular anon.

So why would the changes to anonymity not meet our expectations as a community? And why would they have been delayed for five years?

Here’s some possible explanations, and I think they’re all in play:

Why did it take so long?

• There may be a leadership vacuum in Quora; it’s been rumoured here, and it’s hard to discern, with the secrecy Quora maintains about itself. (I’ve just started reading Sun Tzu; that’s one bit they seem to have learned from him.) I suspect that there is no advocate to push user concerns around anonymity to the forefront, and that there may not be a lot of strategic thinking going on anyway. In that case, anonymity instead degenerates into a technical puzzle, a computer engineering rather than a social engineering issue. Which would also account for the chasing-one’s-tail activity around Quora UX.
• And don’t get me started on ongoing inaction about the accessibility of Quora. Marc Bodnick: No, we haven’t (2011) by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency
• Quora has an on-going slowburn PR disaster on its hand with anon abuse, which it has publicly blithely dismissed until it couldn’t any more. The more users, the more abuse; Violet Blue had plenty to report on in 2014, and I’m sure it’s exponentially worse now, because there are exponentially more users now.
• Quora’s primary responsibility is not user well-being, but whatever its leadership deems a strategic or tactical priority. That is a good thing: Quora isn’t a non-profit that exists to make its users happy, it exists to turn a profit by commodifying its users. That is also a bad thing: it does not mean that Quora is immune from making bad decisions, just because its users think it’s making bad decisions.
  As a result, user discomfort around anonymous trolling has not been a priority to do something about until now.
• Remember that allowing users to disable comments on specific questions came in 2016, two years after the articles highlighting misogyny on Quora, and advocating for more effective blocking: Quora’s Misogyny Problem; Quora’s misogyny problem: A cautionary tale | ZDNet. Two years. What, implementing Google Voice has been more pressing?

Why don’t we like it?

• Quora has limited resources—understandably, as it’s still burning through venture capital six years after launch, and has only started to do something visible about monetisation (ads) within the past year. Anything it does will be on the cheap. Bots, and eliminating as much workflow as possible (hence blanket removal of comments). That maximises the scale of the solution, but of course not its quality.
• Which of course is why they should never have undertaken to review all anon questions before publishing them. And have a Quora staff member put his name to that statement. It was never going to happen, it hasn’t happened, and bots don’t count as review. Good to know we have the most well-spelled trolls in the business though. (I’d just found an answer saying that a troll question got through with QCR fixing a spelling mistake. No I can’t find it; I was convinced it was by Heather Jedrus, but that’s not turning up anything.)
• Mountain View, and Silicon Valley in general, seems prone to Not-Invented-Here, which lends them a certain arrogance and lack of consultation in dealing with these kinds of concern. I think it’s been compounded by the insistence that We-are-not-social-media (so we don’t need to learn from social media on how to do moderation), and Shiny Toys (bots will solve everything! And they’re cheap!)
• If anonymity leaks (and there’s been a few answers suggesting it): lack of QA, lack of real user engagement, reactive implementation, possibly distracted by Shiny Objects rather than security holes.
• I am privy to an security hole unrelated to anonymity that a friend discovered, which I am not publicising (and which has been reported). I am aghast at it. Things like it are getting through into production, and they should not be. That also points to failure in management: the buck does have to stop somewhere.
• I think Anonymous’ answer to What’s your view regarding Quora’s new anonymity policy changes (March 2017)? nails it. We have been utterly puzzled about the insistence on true untraceable anonymity, the Wikileaks or Bunker In Syria scenario, whereas overwhelmingly anonymity here is cultural (“don’t feel comfortable putting my real name to this” is a real cultural norm on the internet, and I wouldn’t be sneering about it if I was you). Anon delivers, and I think this theory makes much more sense, as something that would stir Quora leadership into action.

This reminds me of the Apple iPhone case. These new anonymity changes are basically Quora’s way of distancing itself from the responsibility if any law enforcement agency asks about it.

2016–12–04 by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue

I have just been contacted by Linda:

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Great job about The Insurgency by the way, if this doesn’t come off as patronizing.

(But no more drawings? [disappointed emoji])

You may or may not remember the answer over which I got banned, but there was an off-Quora exchange with the mods (admin? I admit to not knowing the difference) that I find more offensive than the “faked-an-e-mail-and-maintained-sock-puppets” charges.

So, a few hours after I got banned, Jason Li sent me an e-mail expressing his sympathy and saying he’d written to Quora to protest the ban. I’m not what the exact response he got was, but a while later, he posted in the comments section of a question pertaining to my ban that Jonathan Brill had assured him that they’d tried communicating with me before and that it hadn’t gone well (and that after reading through my edit log, he was more in sympathy with Quora’s position. And, admittedly, that answer wasn’t very nice. But I tried to stay respectful!).

Whether he (Jonathan) meant that they’d talked to me directly after the ban or during the six-odd months I’d been active on Quora doesn’t matter – because there was never, ever any direct contact (other than the reply to a message I’d sent after the deletion of my answer inquiring as to why a certain Power User went unpunished for rudeness, discrimination and plagiarism, which Tatiana insisted – more than once – was faked).

Just thought some people might be interested to know I was swiftly and directly banned over of two BNBRs (the answer and a comment underneath in which I merely quoted the subject of my answer – don’t I get an edit-block first?) and that afterwards some people tried to make it sound as though it was a last resort after reaching out to me and getting a prickly ignore, i.e. tried to make it sound better than it looks—and was.

Eh, maybe this message is a bit rambling and I’m overbeating a dead zebra. Wanted someone to know, so….thanks for reading?

And hi to everyone, if you do publish this 🙂

I have received this from Raden Smith (see Follow up on Reddit trolls), and am posting it here at his request.

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I am Raden Smith from Quora and I am writing this email to you to apologise for trolling on Quora and my online behaviour. I found your email id from your Quora account bio.

I want to tell few things about myself first. I got diagnosed with clinical depression in June, 2016 and I recently failed a major exam for which I was preparing since a year. Things have not been going on too well for me lately. I went to Quora to seek support. Then I got to know about the subreddit ‘indianpeoplequora’. And so I started to troll on quora and cross post it on reddit to gain karma points. My trolling on Quora and cross posting on reddit was simply a means of escapism for me, a way of coping up when things were not going on too well in real life. The Karma points I received on reddit boosted my esteem a bit. It was never my intent to hurt anybody.

Having said this, I have come to realise what I did was wrong. And I apologise for my behaviour and any hurt that I have caused. I have realised that there are better ways to seek support for depression and by trolling I am simply harming myself. I have also realised that failing in exam is not a death sentence and my failure does not give me right to troll others and I just need to prepare better and I too will pass the exam.

When I was small (like 5 – 6 years old) I always thought that I would grow up to be a nice person. However, when I look back on my online behaviour I feel ashamed. My smaller self would never have imagined that I would resort to such means as coping mechanism. I feel very ashamed about the way I behaved and I this is when I realised that I need to apologise.

I have deleted both my Quora as well as Reddit account. (I never trolled on Reddit though). I won’t be back online unless I am going to contribute positively.

I have also, as a means of repentance decided to make a donation to an NGO working in sector of woman welfare or animal welfare. I do not earn much so the amount of donation will be small. But I will donate for sure.

I would be grateful if you can post my apology as an edit to your followup blog post on Reddit trolling as I want to convey to people my apology. Kindly keep the email id anon please. This is my dummy email id but I regularly check it so we can communicate to this id.

I do not have email id of Reddit moderator but if you can pass on my apology to him I would appreciate if very much. I have abused the reason for which that particular sub reddit was created and hence I want to apologise to him.

If there is anything else that I can do let me know. If it is within my means, I will do it.

Yup, around 10. Set in Liliput, because I’d just read Gulliver’s Travels, and accompanied by some map drawing. Inspired by the Latin textbooks I was poring over, and it had a hell of a lot of declension tables. And diacritics. El Glheþ Talossan-level diacritics. Coz they’re k00l.

It wasn’t full, because I don’t think I understood enough about language back then; vocabulary was never a problem though—there’s always more Latin where that came from. Never taught it to anyone. Don’t remember a thing about it.