Category: Uncategorized

From harrumphing, get-your-hippy-names-away-from-me answers such as Why do English-speaking people often have strange first names? and Is Khalisi a weird name for a baby?, you will have surmised correctly that I would only go with ancient names that have survived in modern times.

Or been revived in modern times. Ιn Greece, the difference matters: Helen had survived as a saint’s name, Achilles or Odysseus were revived.

So I can’t answer the question as requested in details—

I don’t mean lists of ancient names which have ‘survived’ in modern times (Jason, Helen, etc), I mean unusual ones — from any culture!

—because I wouldn’t do that myself.

But cool names from antiquity, which is what the question details are asking for?

I learned Greek Mythology from the humorist Nikos Tsiforos, as I’ve mentioned a dozen times; and when he was going through the pantheon of minor sea deities, he pointed out one name in particular as lovely. And I agreed with him then as now.

Benthesicyme. Βενθεσικύμη. “Wave of the sea depths.”

Actually, pretend you don’t know the etymology. (And I didn’t know about Benthos until a lot later in life.)

Benthesicyme.

Utterly impractical as a name. (I mean, what would you nickname her? Bennie?)

And utterly lovely. Like an invocation.

I deeply love this question. Because I get to talk about me.

There are three kinds of thing I write about on Quora.

• Linguistics and history that I actually know stuff about, with a particular focus on Greek.
• General humanities and culture questions, where I like to indulge in informed speculation.
• Quora community, which is what I suspect I am most widely known for nowadays.

I am a polarizing figure, and I believe I am more polarizing in Quora community questions than in the other two areas. I have been blocked by two posters on things Greek, and I am frenemies with another such poster. I have gotten very little push back on things cultural, although I deserve more because what I say can be very speculative. But I do make a point of avoiding most controversies.

I suspect, with my blogs and with Scott Welch’s recent bout of discretion, that I am the most visible critic of Quora here. I could be wrong. In fact, I hope I’m wrong. As a result, a few users have chided me, mostly privately, when they have thought I was getting too unhinged. But I have to say, I considered most of those users as friends beforehand, and continue to do so afterwards.

One user has blocked me, as a direct result of my criticisms. I suspect a greater number of users find me annoying, unhelpful, or treasonous. But I actually have very little evidence of that. I have had no communication about anything from Mountain View, despite a few requests for feedback.

So much for the negative. There has also been some positive feedback, I dare say, even beyond those I have come to regard as friends here.

Those that can understand my technical answers seem to appreciate them, and I think I am accepted by them as a scholar. The ones I know to be scholars have pretty much said so. My more general answers, including those speculative humanities answers, are on the whole more popular, because they are more general.

I think people find me insightful. I think people find me an amusing, if atrocious illustrator (Gallery of Awesomery). And I know that people find me a good writer. In fact, I long for advice on how to be a better writer, which is why I seem to spend most of my day lately in Facebook Chat with Jennifer Edeburn.

I have heard rumours that in some of the more insalubrious back alleys of Quora, my Insurgent activities have made me something of a folk hero. I find that somewhat embarrassing, and somewhat more concerning: I did not join Quora, after all, to find an outlet for my dudgeon. But, thanks guys… I guess…?

Some of you will have noticed Quora Compass by Nick Nicholas on Assorted Polls:

Much as the Political Compass tries to simplistically plot peoples’ political orientation, the Quora Compass tries to simplistically plot users’ attitudes towards Quora, on two axes that I find of interest: “Loyalist” vs “Insurgent” (substitute your own epithets), and “Knowledge Repository” vs “Social Media”.

The Quora Compass is simplistic. The current form of the poll is even more simplistic; just two scaled question answers, with much selection bias. It would be nice to workshop something with a few more questions, and I welcome suggestions. But I find the concept interesting, and I will be updating the results of the poll here.

So. The Quora Compass classifies users along two axes. As Jennifer Edeburn formulated the questions,

• Insurgent: Quora has many flaws and really needs to do a lot of work to reduce my frustration with the platform
• Loyalist: Quora is fine, sure there are mistakes made occasionally but I’m sure they have a good reason for everything they do.
• Knowledge Repository: I don’t really feel that it adds value to have a group of users that I comment or exchange with routinely.
• Social media: I value the time spent conversing with my friends about my answers or theirs more highly than I do the time spent reading randomly in the feed or answering questions.

For convenience, I’ll call the last two categories Expertists vs Socialisers.

The Compass is all about the quadrants; and inspired by this:

I will name the quadrants as follows:

• Loyalist Expertist (closest alignment to the goals of Quora): Dogs
• Loyalist Socialiser: Dolphins
• Insurgent Expertist: Bees
• Insurgent Socialiser: Cats

If I were to put caricatures on this chart:

• Marc Bodnick
• Richard Stallman
• Oscar Wilde (author)
• Cary Grant (actor)

If I were to put Quora friends on the chart, according to their self-nominated scores:

And these are the results of the poll so far. 127 results. [Updated: 2017–04–20]

• Loyalists: 60; Insurgents: 48; Neutral: 19
• Socialisers: 30; Expertists: 66; Neutral: 31
• Loyalist Expertist (closest alignment to the goals of Quora): Dogs: 31
• Loyalist Socialiser: Dolphins: 11
• Insurgent Expertist: Bees: 30
• Insurgent Socialiser: Cats: 13

In first posting:

Fairly even distribution, except that Dolphins are rare: if you are loyal to the aims of Quora as an expert forum, you have confidence in Quora’s moderation policies. But the allegiance to Quora’s aim as an expert forum is more pervasive than the confidence in moderation.

Currently [UPDATE 2017–04–20]: Clearly many more bees and dogs—expertists—than dolphins and cats; since the initial results, cats are as rare as dolphins.

I’ve already addressed a narrower version of the same question: Nick Nicholas’ answer to In the traditional British public school system, why is (or was) it believed that knowledge of “the classics” was necessary?

In the Renaissance, when Roman and Greek literature were rediscovered, that literature was treated as the source and reference point of all culture. To know that literature was to be cultured. […]

And the point of a liberal arts education back then, as it was in Ancient Greece, was not to get you a job. You didn’t go to uni for that; you went out as an apprentice, and people looked down on you as a mechanical. The point of a liberal arts education was to be cultured. To appreciate good literature. To form good judgement. To have good character. […]

And everyone doing science or literature read Latin, because that’s what intellectuals wrote in. And because they now had access to the classics, they would try to speak it more like the Romans did, and less like the mediaeval clerks did. Doing science and reading Cicero were part of the same package. It was all part of being cultured.

In the 16th and 17th and 18th century, the English developed their own literature. Gradually more and more science was written outside of Latin. So you didn’t need just Latin to appreciate good literature or do science. But the public school system stuck with it, because their ancestors did, and because Classical literature was still felt to be awesome, and because old habits died hard. And because you didn’t get a public school education to get a job. You got one to be cultured. Besides, any job you were likely to get as an aristocrat would be tied up with being cultured anyway.

Things have changed. Riff-raff […] get to go to high school and university. And we need to keep getting a job in mind, because we are riff-raff and not cashed up members of the aristocracy. And the Classics are only one option among many, and hardly the most prestigious one even among the liberal arts.

Yes. Using tools from Online Etymology Dictionary:

Humilis is Latin for humble. Humble is Old French humble < *humle < *humile < humilis.

Humility is from Latin humilitas “humbleness”, which comes from humilis.

Humiliate is to make someone feel like crap: you’re humbling them, you’re making them feel low (which is actually what humilis originally means: lowly). Humiliate is a back formation from humiliation, humiliatio in Latin, which is derived from the verb humiliare “to make humble”, which comes from humilis.

It turns out Middle English used to have a verb derived straight from humiliare: to humily “humble oneself”.

Surname – Wikipedia

Surnames seems to have been invented independentishly in Europe at a similar time: they were reintroduced after the Roman three-way names fell out of use in the West. From Wikipedia, I see it’s a messy web of transmission. Wikipedia suggests (not very loudly) that the Modern Western notion of surnames was transmitted from Armenia to Byzantium (from the 7th century on) to the West, though I wonder whether the West came up with them independently. Ireland had them in the 10th century, and England in the 11th; they only became common in the West in the 14th century.

Now, other cultures independently came up with surnames, as distinct from patronymics; the Chinese did, and so did the Japanese nobility. But how did a Western notion become globalised?

… Do you really have to ask?

During the modern era, many cultures around the world adopted family names, particularly for administrative reasons, especially during the age of European expansion and particularly since 1600. Notable examples include the Netherlands (1811), Japan (1870s), Thailand (1920), and Turkey (1934). Nonetheless, their use is not universal: Icelanders, Tibetans, Burmese, Javanese, and many people groups in East Africa do not use family names.

Surnames were put forward not just because of European influence, but because the emergence of big bureaucracies with nationwide scope saw the benefit in the European convention of surnames: that explains Meiji Japan, for instance. And of course surnames were still transmitted as a cultural meme, and not just a bureaucratic convenience. As pointed out in Kutluk Ozguven’s answer to Why do some Greek surnames end with “oğlu” which means “son of” in Turkish?, Christians in Turkey had surnames a lot longer than Muslims did, because Greeks and Armenians invented surnames to begin with.

You strategically name drop or link to your blog in an answer. If you don’t set a topic for each and every blog post you write (because Quora decided you don’t need topics to apply to an entire blog after all), that’s going to be the main mechanism of getting your blog into people’s feeds.

Less gamified motivation to write on topics that I was just outside of MVW status for (like I dunno, Language or Etymology or Latin). Slightly less motivation to write as a result, although the A2As keep coming in.

Slightly less motivation to follow users, because I can’t tell from a mouseover what they are into.

There was never any indication of MVW on the Request menu listing of users anyway, so that has little impact.

Much less of a feeling of community with other MVWs in a topic (that I have to hunt to find), which did give me added motivation to write.

Jenny!

Jenny, I know you’re in chronic pain and rather silly about your own pain management. When you get those Zydax® – Injections to Reduce Arthritis in Dogs? That’s not a cue for you to start running berserk in the doggie park again. Or to jump all over the doggie chiro.

Just relax, Jen. Take it easy.

Well, maybe not that easy.

And Jenny, I am going to have to carry you up and down the stairs now, because you don’t want to be in even more pain.

No, don’t run!

Oh for Chrissake.

So, Jenny, you are a fricking pain in the arse, and you plopped into my life as a package deal with Tamar, and I gave you a hard time when you were younger and even more of a pain in the arse; but you are a gooooood doggie, gooooood doggie, and—

Jenny? Jenny?

Fricking dog.

To corroborate John Simpson’s answer to In “whosoever looks upon a woman to lust after her,” might that ‘to’ indicate a purpose clause?:

The Greek literally says Ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι πᾶς ὁ βλέπων γυναῖκα πρὸς τὸ ἐπιθυμῆσαι αὐτῆς, ἤδη ἐμοίχευσεν αὐτὴν ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ αὑτοῦ, “towards the desiring of her”. That “towards” is indeed purposive, and it’s also not particularly Classical in taking an infinitive (though Classical Greek did use it as a purposive preposition: πρὸς τί “to what end?”, literally “towards what?”)

Classical usage of the infinitive with πρός is more literal: πῶς ἔχεις πρὸς τὸ ἐθέλειν ἂν ἰέναι ἄκλητος ἐπὶ δεῖπνον; “what is your attitude towards going to dinner uninvited?” But in this context, it looks clearly purposive to me.