Category: Uncategorized

Ἰθάκηνδε, which occurs five times in the Odyssey (1.88, 1.163, 11.361, 15.157, 16.322).

This has been said plenty by others, and I’m just clearing my backlog with this, but:

All justice is reasonable when administered with equity. See Michael Masiello’s answer to What do you hate about Quora as of March 2017?

BNBR sure does not look like it is administered with equity. Moderation does not do context or extenuating circumstance, and it’s not supposed to.

But that’s the complaint about the implementation of BNBR.

I have plenty of concerns about BNBR as a policy itself: I think it is problematic.

BNBR licences bad knowledge and truthiness: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why has Quora become a magnet for flat Earth and Moon landing conspiracy questions that must be given BNBR respect, even though they’re undeserving? BNBR suppresses criticism of individuals, and has a chilling effect on criticism of a lot of things. BNBR gets fetishised as an end in itself, rather than a means to more civil discourse. And BNBR is blatantly culture-specific: there is no universal measure of niceness or respect. (So everyone gets measured by a Northern Californian norm. Or that of the subcontractors thereof, or that of the bots thereof.)

These are all controversial claims, and there’s plenty of arguments to be made for and against. But saying BNBR is reasonable as a given, before moving on to how it is misapplied in practice, is not how those arguments get had.

Ah, you know there is, OP.

Greeks do have a tradition of omen-names they give kids, once they’re run out of grandparents to name their kids after—although with the drop of children per mother, and of traditional superstitions, they are probably no longer issued.

Greeks did not like female births, because they cost them. Less hands to help around the family farm, when they moved away to join their husbands’ household; and a whole lot of expense in paying out dowry. So if you had a whole lot of daughters in succession, you would eventually give one a name, asking it to stop.

One of those names, in fact, is Stamato or Stamatina. Those names are the feminines of Stamatis, which is derived from stamaˈto ‘stop’. There is no St Stamatius, and the feast day for people called Stamatis, Stamato, or Stamatina is November 8, St Michael’s day. Apparently (Σταμάτιος – Σταματία), the Archangel Michael was supposed to have said “let us stand well, let us stand with fear of God”, a line from the Mass, to stop the fallen angels from falling.

(OK, I lied. There are neomartyrs called Stamatius. Neomartyrs are martyrs under Ottoman rule; that tells you that the name was already around before Ottoman rule, and it wasn’t around thanks to any of the original batch of saints. So those neomartyrs were just called “stop!”, even if it they were boys.)

Tina Fey is Greek from her mother’s side; Tina is short for Stamatina. She has one older brother, so her name is likely not an omen name; it could have been an ancestor’s though.

Another such omen name, used in Thessaly, is Agoro, a feminine derived from aɣori ‘boy’. Αγόρω.

Abigail, I go all Michaelis Maus whenever I see unanimity. I go all the more Michaelis Maus now that Michaelis has been banned.

It’s hard for me to, because the OP (who has since deleted their account) put in the proviso: “without hurting or offending others”.

But pay attention to that: they had to. Being yourself is not a paramount goal. You still have to be part of society. You still have to be not-yourself enough, in order not to make your life a constant battle. You need discretion in life, too, and discretion is about holding back on being yourself.

If you’ve found a way to do that, that’s great: that means you’ve worked out discretion. But it’s not a one-off deal. You need to recalibrate how much of yourself you need to suppress, to be more likeable, in given social circumstances; and those circumstances are going to change, and expand, as you move around. They’ll certainly get more constrained in the workplace, for example. It’s a balancing act, and you’re going to keep balancing. Middle age is about grubby compromises. We do what we can get away with.

No good saying this to OP, they’re not here. Good luck to the rest of you.

I’m suffering this right now.

If you’re overrun with A2As, as I am: don’t get around to answering them in a hurry. And if someone else has gotten around it before you do, and you’re happy with their answer, well, that’s a win, isn’t it? 🙂

I would not dilute my interests, but I would let some questions slide. I’m not good at that, but what’s the alternative.

A2A’d by Emlyn Shen.

All I know about Emlyn is that she’s Asian, trans, and a teenager. To me, she’ll always be her profile pic, as most of you are:

Yet somehow, I doubt that’s a photographic depiction.

I don’t get out much, so I don’t know many Asian trans young people. If the profile pic is not, as it turns out, a True Likeness of Emlyn, then I’m going to guess she looks a little like Natalie Chen:

Natalie Chen is creating TransGirl Cosplay | Patreon

Emlyn, am I close?

Like Riccardo Radici’s answer says:

It is a variant of βροῦκος = locust (see: Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, Βροῦκος)

OP has expanded on his inquiry:

Its a word in the Greek Septuagint.

Ive seen it translated in 3 different ways:

Caterpilar,grasshopper,or lightning.

But I have no idea how they came with these translations.I cant find any background info on this word with the resources i have.

I would appriciate any additional information anyone can give me about this word.

OK:

From LSJ, we know that broûkos is ‘locust’ or ‘locust larva’, and that the word turns up in that meaning in Theophrastus:

Locusts [akrides] are dangerous, wingless locusts [atteleboi] even more so, especially those known as broukoi. (Fragment 174)

We know that Hesychius says it is Ionic, and he gives related forms from other dialects in the same meaning.

Frisk’s Etymological Dictionary notes that the Etymologicum Magnum had speculated it is related to the verb brýkō ‘bite, gnash’. You should always be sceptical about Byzantine etymologies, and Frisk remains so. Frisk is also not persuaded by the connection that some scholars have seen with Russian brýkat’ ‘kick with hind legs’, Ukrainian brykáty ‘to jump around deliberately’.

The Septuagint uses the word, in the form broûkhos, 10 times: Lev 11:22, 3 Ki 8:37, 2 Chron 6:28, Ps 104:34, Amos 7:1, Joel 1:4 (bis), 2:25, Nahum 3:15, 3:16. In most of those instances, it occurs next to akrís ‘locust’ or kámpē ‘caterpillar’. Thus Joel 1:4: “What the locust swarm has left the great locusts have eaten; what the great locusts have left the young locusts have eaten; what the young locusts have left other locusts have eaten.” In the Septuagint: “The leftovers of the caterpillar have been eaten by the locust, and the leftovers of the locust have been eaten by the broukhos; and the leftovers of the broukhos have been eaten by the rust [wheat disease].” (Yes, the Hebrew names four different kinds of locust.)

The word remained in use—though anything in the Septuagint was guaranteed bookish survival: a Byzantine chronicle (Schreiner’s Die byzantinischen Kleinchroniken, 45 §4, says that “in the year 6350 [841–842 AD], on the fifth indiction, broûkhos fell on Sicily.”

Byzantine dictionaries gloss broûkhos as caterpillar or locust; LSJ is betting that the Byzantine dictionaries were just guessing from context (the Septuagint mentions them together), and that any caterpillars were in fact larvae.

I’m not seeing anything linking broûkhos to lightning by googling.

EDIT: This appears to be an error in online versions of Strong’s concordance, which conflate βρο­ῦχος with βροντή ‘thunder’.

… I’ve just realised he’s deleted his account here.

He did leave forwarding details with me though: he’s on Steemit.

Looking at Sidney Allen’s Vox Graeca, we know that Plato (Cratylus 427a) describes both δ and τ as stops. The first unequivocal evidence is the differentiation between б and в in Cyrillic in the 9th century AD. It turns out though that at the same time, beta was being transliterated in Georgian as as ბ b rather than ვ v. Cicero (Fam ix 22.3) says that βινεῖ ‘he fucks’ is pronounced as Latin bini. On the other hand, Allen concedes that some non-Attic dialects (Boeotian, Elean, Pamphylian) may have started fricating voiced stops as early as the 4th century B.C.

Allen is reluctant to commit to any time of transition. The really long description at Koine Greek phonology – Wikipedia, pitting Allen against Gignac’s investigation of papyri, indicates that it was probably over a drawn-out period, with variation by region or register. However, the usual assumption I have seen is frication starting as [β], around the 1st century AD.

I’m in more sympathy with Yonatan Gershon’s answer and its free speech absolutism than with Ted Wrigley’s answer which relies on intent. Intent is a very hard thing to diagnose, and I’m not sure I trust a judiciary allied to power to judge it fairly; and of course, any dissidence can be regarded as disruptive and to be quashed.

But I’m going to expand on Jacob Holcomb’s answer, which I think makes a more useful distinction (though I draw the dividing line elsewhere):

We can talk about the effects of depression, but I’d prefer not to delve into discussing suicide.

Ruling a whole topic out of bounds is lunacy, and it’s inviting protest and circumvention. It was lunacy when Melbourne University banned books about jihad from being borrowed, to much media hoopla, just as it is lunacy to ban ownership of Al-Qaeda literature: if you can’t study your enemy, how on earth do you intend to combat them?

If speech is to be policed for noxious intent, as hate speech or advocacy of criminal behaviour, you have to draw a very careful boundary. Unlike Jacob, I don’t think discussing suicide should be banned; as long as there are some proactive disclaimers and steps around mitigating the effects of that discussion. Whenever anyone’s suicide is mentioned in the press here in Australia, the phone number of the suicide hotline is given as a footer or as a fadeout announcement. That, it seems to me, is reasonable. And though I would want a high bar on it, outright advocacy of suicide, or of terrorism, should be curtailed in the mass media. The high bar means that discussion of Islamic grievances, or of the nature of jihadi thought, should not be blocked—although, again, there should be mitigation and disclaimers accompanying the discussion.

I also think banning Mein Kampf is counterproductive, btw, or The Protocols of Zion. And good luck blocking their dissemination through the Internet anyway.