Another recent data point: Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir
I wasn’t given a reason — all I know is that I was automatically logged out yesterday, and the next moment I’m locked out of logging in because I’m permanently banned. I lost a lot of detailed answer drafts, some content I’d written in response to questions in Quora messages, and a 8000+ word blog post criticising The Political Compass. I’m glad I’d at least posted the long comments I was writing before I got banned.
Nothing. Any sanction to collapse questions or answers from a banned user is separate from the action taken to ban that user. That’s not to rule it out from happening, but it is not automatically triggered, as far as we know.
Tough one, I agree. And it turns out OP was after Ancient Greek.
For Modern Greek, I agree with Yiannis Papadopoulos’ answer to What is the Greek equivalent of “Skin in the Game”? that “skin in the game” is about emotional investment, not “putting your ass on the line”. It’s easier for me to actually think of negative rather than positive statements.
Plato?
More of a polyglot game, this, than a linguist game, but: switch the TV to a foreign language film halfway through, and try to work out what the language is. The fact that the language almost always sustains a local film industry does constrain the possible choices.
The rule of thumb I worked out quite early is, if they look Swedish and sound Turkish, they’re Hungarian.
Well, this is what the Googles gets me (with a peek at the OED):
Owt and Nowt are shibboleths for Yorkshire: they are very common dialect words. The historical pronunciation seems to be something like /ou/. They are indeed derived from aught and naught; the spelling with an au is from Early Modern Southern English, and Middle English usually spelled them as ought and nought. Brought in Yorkshire rhymes with owt. (Remember that in Middle English, the <gh> was a kh sound.)
On the other hand, the <ou> diphthong which normally rhymes with <ow> in English is either -ah-, in the West Riding (e.g. Sheffield), or -oo- in the North and East Riding: abaht, aboot.
Hence Nathan Morris’ answer to Could someone tell of “owt” or “nowt” regarding Yorkshire?
A can tell thee owt tha wants to know abart.
[I can tell thee aught thou wants to know about]
EDIT:
Joseph Boyle asks whether the aboot of East Yorkshire is related to the aboot of Canada and the US South Highlands.
The Yorkshire and Scots aboot really is pronounced aboot. It is a an archaism, representing the pronunciation of <ou> before the Great English Vowel Shift. (Middle English used the French pronunciation of <ou>.) Notice that Yorkshire keeps <ou> and <ow> separate.
The Great English Vowel Shift changed iː to əi to ai. It’s why reconstructed Shakespearean pronunciation sounds like a pirate: West Country English, on which Hollywood pirate talk is based, has kept the older əi pronunciation.
What happened to Middle English i: also happened to uː : uː > əu > au.
So Shakespeare would in fact have sounded like a Canadian pirate.
The chain of development is East Yorkshire aboot > Canadian and Southern Virginian əbəut > standard English about > West Yorkshire abaht. Logically, that tells you that the missing link pronunciation used to occur in West Yorkshire as well, and eventually gave rise to abaht via about. But there is no reason to think that there is anything Yorkshire about Canadian raising. It appears to be a general archaism, although not one that Wikipedia has much history on.
And yes, all my information is from Wikipedia.
Originally asked as: What would a conversation between heavenly bodies be like?
Downtown at Brazzers HQ:
—Hey stranger! Woah! Nice sixpack, dude!
—Yeah, gotta work out when I can. Hey, you’ve healed up nice!
—Yeah, you like? I went with the single Ds. Better match for my frame.
—Awesome. So. Standard set of positions in this shoot?
…
Oh, I’m sorry, you meant a different kind of heavenly bodies.
Well, to take my mind from the gutter right up to the sublime, I invoke Michael Masiello’s answer to What was God doing during the infinity prior to creating man? (I’m an atheist.)
The thing to understand is that temporality is the dimension in which finite beings, who undergo change, who begin and end, perceive reality and have their being. It is sequential, narrative-like, a process of generation and corruption.
God is typically conceived as eternal, atemporal: he sees all of what finite, conditioned minds would perceive as “times” uno mentis in ictu, as Boethius would say, “in one stroke of the mind.” There is only one eternal moment, one word eternally speaking. This is sometimes called a nunc stans (see nunc stans – definition of nunc stans in English | Oxford Dictionaries).
What sort of conversation do you have with someone timeless? Someone for whom there is no new information to exchange, nothing to learn? Never mind understanding such a being, how do you even meaningfully talk to someone in the nunc stans?
No, Arrival (2016 movie) did not really cover this off.
Well, what conversations do the heavenly spheres have? They’re just as timeless, just as unchanging: nothing to learn, nothing to forget, nothing to exchange that won’t already have been exchanged. Even in the physical universe, what discourse can there be between bodies whose nunc isn’t stans, but which does measure in the billions of years?
You might say my imaginary discussion between two professionals in peak physical condition, in the San Fernando Valley, is inane. I’d say by our metric, the discourse of Mercury and Mars would be much more inane:
—Orbit.
—Other Orbit.
—I see you.
—Then you won’t. Then you will again.
—Is this over yet?
—Orbit.
—Other Orbit.
—I see you.
—Then you won’t. Then you will again.
The problem with Quora’s policies is that they are fairly high level and vague, and they require the equivalent of judges to interpret them. Christopher VanLang and other former volunteer mods have expertise in the tradition of interpretation they formed, and they would be better placed than me to answer this.
In my opinion alone, a sincere question about a conspiracy theory should not be against BNBR. Hate speech is against BNBR. Advocacy of a conspiracy theory is close to hate speech, but it’s even more close to irrational speech (and I’ve been quite unimpressed by the instances OP has pointed to.)
Discussion of the conspiracy theory however is permitted: there is no block on irrational speech, and there is the expectation that it can be refuted rationally, and the requirement that it be conducted respectfully. Hence Bodnick, with his… curiously double edged wording:
Discussion of conspiracy theories is totally welcome and is consistent with Quora’s mission.
As Joshua Engel’s answer to Should discussion of conspiracy theories be banned on Quora? As a community, are we valuing niceness over debating the truth? points out, conspiracy theorists will tend to violate BNBR overtly anyway:
I suppose it’s interesting to consider the notion that conspiracy theorists are far more likely to violate those policies. After all, a conspiracy theory (more or less by definition) involves the belief that people are out to hide the truth from you, and so anybody who disagrees is either lying or stupid. It will be difficult to discuss that without violating the policies. And conversely, everybody disagreeing is nearly certain to think that the theorist is, themselves, either lying or stupid, and it will be difficult to avoid bringing that up. This is what makes “conspiracy theories” different from other matters of mere disagreement.
Add to that of course the fact that the conspiracy theory in question is based on religious antagonism, which makes hate speech even likelier to arise.
One can counter that the promotion of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories makes Quora unfriendly to Muslims, and one might investigate whether antisemitic and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories are prosecuted with the same fervour. I don’t know; The Protocols of the Elders of Zion exists as a topic, though the questions are pretty neutral, and the Love Jihad questions are not.
Those questions would probably fall afoul not in principle of the policy of BNBR, as Hate Speech, but of the guidelines for neutrally phrased questions (see Should questions on Quora be phrased neutrally? Why, or why not?); in particular: Quora’s answer to What are the main policies and guidelines for questions on Quora?
The word is all over the place in Plato and his contemporaries and it’s not in Homer. Philosophy – Wikipedia guesses that Pythagoras probably came up with it first.
The basis for that guess, from what I can tell, is that as cited in LSJ (s.v. φιλόσοφος), both Cicero (Tusc. 5.3.9) and Diogenes Laertes (prooem 12) report that Pythagoras called himself a philosophos “lover of wisdom”, and not just a sophos “wise man, scholar”. That implies to me that this terminology was an innovation by Pythagoras. Pythagoras was certainly early enough in the philosophical tradition for that to make sense.
For me, the words are very meaningful, and I do care if a person is feminine or masculine.
But then, noone would confuse me with anyone who’s answered the opposite.
I am also very much aware of the contingency and cultural specificity of femininity and masculinity as constructs. I am aware that there are plenty of people who have difficulty or malaise aligning to them. I am aware that they can lead to toxic consequences unchecked, and that there is a consensus in flux about how they are negotiated and defined and externalised and internalised.
Vote #1 Victoria Weaver of course: Victoria Weaver’s answer to For you, what are femininity and masculinity? I’m talking about the sociological sense here.
Are they real? As real as fashion sense or race or music. They’re all in the head. That doesn’t mean they’re not real. That doesn’t mean they can’t be a source of good in the world—they’re constructs that it is up to us to harness. And they don’t disappear in a puff of smoke, just because we’ve identified their downsides.
To talk of the psychological sense: I’m not going to apologise for finding femininity attractive, or for feeling good about certain aspects of masculinity. I have a socially conditioned sexuality, and having a sexuality is a good thing. In itself, having a straight sexuality doesn’t make me (to pull out some representative examples) biphobic, transphobic, squicked by agender or bigender people, or whatever else. For me; others will see it differently, I expect.
I do not believe that having a sexuality, informed by constructs of masculinity and femininity, automatically makes you a pig; I also have a superego, after all. And the norms that inform that superego, and that determine the sociological nature of gender constructs, are being remoulded and renegotiated. As well they should.
In its modern meaning of mathematics, the earliest citation Liddell–Scott give is the treatise of the same name by Archytas. (However, the German Wikipedia doubts that was the original title of his work.) The term comes into its own in its modern meaning in Aristotle, a generation later, who uses it extensively.
Plato was the exact same age as Archytas and his friend, but he only used the term to mean “fond of learning” (Timaeus 88c), or “scientific” (Sophist 219c). He does get close when he refers to the three mathemata (sciences) of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy (Laws 817e), but he isn’t quite there yet, and his term for mathematics is logismos, “calculation”.