Michael is one of my extended circle of fellow language aficionados. I will admit that I do not know him as well as I do others. I have not noticed him posting anything acerbic, but I will note that at times he seems somewhat detached. However, I have also noticed him posting with great empathy about South African politics.
One of these days, I will be asking the same question about myself…
The world was blessed, that a US president should take so much interest in foreign policy, and stake his posterity on it. The world was cursed, that Nixon was that president, and he squandered so much of his foreign policy on political point-scoring.
From my reading:
The Magister Michael Masiello has done what Quora is best for—even if it is expressly against the intent of the Founders. He has taken a humdrum question, and turned into a hymn to sodality: Michael Masiello’s answer to What do you value more on Quora, views, upvotes, or followers? Why?
And I’m not saying that because he namechecked me. After all, I NEVER GOT NOTIFICATION OF THE NAME CHECK! AGAIN!
I concur with him (and Habib le toubib before him): the comments show true engagement; the comments are what give me both delight and instruction; the comments matter most of all. If D’Angelo had had his way and done away with comments, as is rumoured (God knows where I read that, because Quora Search)—then I would not have stayed here.
Of the rest, almost noone cares about views, clearly—and I found Mani Duraisamy’s answer, with its preference for views as an objective criterion, puzzling.
As Joachim Pense has said somewhere (and I’m sure many others have), upvotes are a kind of currency among friends, an acknowledgement of reading; if anything, it’s my withholding of upvotes from my cabal that communicates something, not my upvote. (And likewise, when I notice a friend doesn’t upvote something I thought they’d read, I get somewhat antsy.) The more valued upvotes are from people I don’t follow. Although if they keep upvoting, I end up following them anyway.
But highly upvoted answers seem just as subject to fads and randomness as highly viewed answers, so I don’t particularly pay it that much attention. I know what my best work is, and it’s usually not my most popular.
I do like the notion of having an impact, but for me the easiest way of gauging that is still follower count.
Trump is, of course, only a symptom of a worldwide populist revolt, on both the right and the left, against elites and bien-pensant liberalism. Expect to find a lot of both political and linguistic propriety jetissoned. Expect much more coarseness and braggadocio in public discourse. But the speech now being “uncovered” was always there.
Matthew Franklin, Jakub Handlíř and Tomas Rocha Martins are completely correct.
If you’re looking for an equivalent to ISIS in the 13th or 14th century, you’re looking for an agent that is not abiding by the then extant international rules of conduct, and that is reviled universally, by coreligionists and outsiders alike, as being beyond the pale.
The Ottomans started as ghazis, so they were more aggressive about their expansion than Muslims had been recently. But they were not aliens from a different planet, the way ISIS is to everyone else.
ISIS is also small, but I don’t think that’s a useful differentiator. Osman’s emirate of Bithynia started out pretty small too.
The closest equivalent, I’ll suggest, is Genghis Khan.
EDIT: Dimitris Almyrantis is right in comments: it’s the Assassins. And Dimitris, post more about the Kharijy?
There are people on this thread who are calling you a snob, too.
Screw ’em.
You have an aesthetic. You have a grounding for that aesthetic, that you can (I hope) articulate and defend. Hopefully, it’s an aesthetic that’s also aware of its own contingency and situatedness, and has no pretensions of immutable truth.
People like films for their own reasons, and that’s fine. Someone’s got to buy tickets for Transformers and Finding Dory and the ten gajillion different comic book films out there, after all. People are entitled to their own preferences, and their own aesthetics, even.
And you’re still entitled to say you know stuff about how film works, that they don’t. That you can see things going on that they don’t, and that you catch innovations and derivativeness that they can’t. You can still judge art without succumbing to some levelling miasma of “everything is valid, screw your training”.
Seriously. As I’ve posted elsewhere: I had no idea what the local metal music radio show was talking about, when they were saying that group A was brutal and amazing, and group B was derivative and ridiculous. They both sounded like noise to me. But the fact that they could make that discernment reassured me. It confirmed to me that they had an aesthetics, and that its subject matter was art.
“You can’t judge other people’s works of art, man” is not an aesthetics.
And if you’re annoyed by “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion”?
Say what the great wrestler Jerry Lawler once said.
Well, you’re entitled to your opinion.
AND EVERYBODY’S ENTITLED TO MY OPINION!
Cypriots refer to English pounds, for the simple reason that colloquial Greek refers to English rather than British exclusively. Note that your phrase uses the colloquial εγγλέζικη, rather than the formal αγγλική for “English”.
The formation of the United Kingdom never made much of a popular impression on Greeks. In fact even in more formal Greek, the British rule of Cyprus is referred to as the Anglocracy, Αγγλοκρατία, not the Brettanocracy.
Nick, what are you doing responding to this question?! You’re a PhD in Greek linguistics, with 18 years of working at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae!
Yes, but I never did formally study Ancient Greek. And I know enough linguistics that I can filter out stuff about Ancient Greek that I’m not supposed to know.
Aristotle:
About that poetics and its kinds, whatever power each kind has, and how myths should be put together if poetry is to have (?) well, and moreover how many particles and of what sort it is made of, and similarly about everything else this is of that method: let us speak of these, starting as is natural with first things first.
[I deliberately missed “poetry per se” in ποιητικῆς αὐτῆς, left “myth” as a faux ami, and ignored “have well” = “turn out well” (and you’d need high school Ancient Greek to know the future tense of “have” at all).]
There’ll be a couple of words to trip over, but an educated Modern Greek speaker will understand the essence of it unaided. I’m deliberately not polishing it further.
Procopius: Justinian was greedy for money, and was so inappropriately (?) a lover of other people’s things (wives?), that all of the gold that was subject to him he would sell to the administrators of the authorities, to those who elect (?) taxes, and to those who wish to stitch together evil designs towards people for no good reason.
[ἐραστής is begging to be misconstrued as “sexual lover”. ἐκλέγουσι is actually obscure to me in this context, and I’m not heading to a dictionary. The “gold subject to him”, the Latin tells me, really is “the gold of his subjects”.]
Slightly more obscure, but again, an educated Modern Greek speaker will understand the essence of it.
Now. Ask me what a peasant would have made of this 200 years ago, and you’d have a very different answer.
OP.
Rahul’s list being a year old, it excludes Jordan Yates and Annika Schauer. But that’s OK, I did want a neutral common reference.
Rahul has 153 people. I will not include celebrities from whom I’ve never seen a post (such as Vint Cerf).
So that’s only 1/3 of them that I’ve noticed here.
UPDATE, given Edward Conway’s answer.
I follow: 0
I like: 11
I dislike: 9. To date I’ve blocked 1.
UPDATE, 3 months later. I follow 1. I have blocked 2.
If you don’t know about the Greek language question, look at the link: this won’t really make sense otherwise.
Neeraj Mathur asked in comments to Nick Nicholas’ answer to Who were the biggest enemies of Greek?
So in a sense, the Katharevousa partisans would have portrayed the Demotic advocates as the enemies of Greek heritage, while the other side would see them as the enemies of Greek folk culture. How heated was the actual debate?
Enough for people to be killed. 8 demonstrators in the Gospel riots in 1901 (protesting a translation of the Gospel of Matthew into the vernacular), and 2 demonstrators in the Orestes riots (Ορεστειακά) of 1903 (protesting the translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia into the vernacular).
Of course, as with any such organised violent conflict, other stuff was going on; Greece had been militarily humiliated in 1897 by the Ottomans, Greece was panicked about Bulgarian encroachment to its north, and the Gospel translation was sponsored by Queen Olga, who was Russian. So, Hey Presto, moral panic: “the Russians are undermining our religion to turn us into Slavs”, combined somehow with “the Protestants are out to deracinate us” (since the translator lived in Liverpool, and there had been Protestant missionary activity in Greece for decades).
Now, this is not how a Diglossia is supposed to work. In normal diglossias, like you get in Egypt or Haiti or, for that matter, Greek in Cyprus, you have a Low variant and a High variant, people know when to use which, and it’s just the way things are done. That’s what Greece was like up to 1880. (Not the Ionian Islands though, which used the vernacular in literature, and were not in Greece until 1864.)
And the ideology was pretty universally respected: Puristic Greek would efface the orientalist shame of the vernacular, and restore Greek to something more respectable, though not as a full revival of Ancient Greek. (That made Puristic a quite unstable compromise, varying by author, and adrift between Koine and Mediaeval Greek.)
That started breaking down in the 1870s, with Valaoritis’ vernacular patriotic poetry being given official recognition. It blew up with activists in the 1880 and 1890s, of whom Psichari was only the loudest. And the dispute then was ideological, as Neeraj guessed: “enemies of our Hellenic heritage” vs “enemies of our Romaic heritage”.
Add to that though that Psichari was a Neogrammarian: the somersaults that Puristic Greek had to do to compromise between Ancient Greek and the vernacular offended him as a linguist, and he advocated a linguistically consistent morphology and phonology.
If Psichari sounds ridiculously folksy to modern speakers, it’s not because he was linguistically wrong: Standard Greek phonetics is utterly ridiculous because of its spelling pronunciations of ancient Greek. It’s because Psichari was sociolinguistically clueless (not helped by the fact that he did not live in Greece). The next generation of activists, such as Triantafyllidis and Tzartzanos, were more sociolinguistically aware, and advocated a vernacular closer to what is used now, with more concessions towards Puristic.
By their time, Demotic was universally used in literature; and the Greek diglossia was derailed: it was now a competition between two norms, Puristic and Demotic, for the status of High language. And with Demotic universal in literature, Puristic was on the back foot—though it remained universal in government and the church).
In Psichari’s generation, the conflict was Hellenic vs Romaic, but it was not yet Left vs Right. Psichari himself was a royalist; the early Communist Party dismissed the Language Question as a bourgeois distraction. And though “enemies of our Hellenic heritage” nowadays sounds reactionary, at the time it was introduced in the 1810s, Puristic was actually a vehicle of the Enlightenment, and seen as progressive.
By the 1920s, though, Puristic vs Demotic had settled into Right Wing vs Left Wing. People could work out your political persuasion in Greece, by whether you used the 1st declension or the 3rd declension in your genitives of –is nouns.
No, I am not exaggerating: I lived in Greece at the very tail end of that language feeling, and an -εως genitive still makes me wince. It’s one of the many conflicts Dimitra Triantafyllidou and I delight in having. And hey, it’s better than Turkey, where the political shibboleth was the shape of your moustache.
What killed Puristic in the end was the 1967 dictatorship’s reactionary enthusiasm for it: when democracy was restored, Puristic was dispensed with in government with universal revulsion. What replaced it of course was not Psichari’s ideal; the Constitution even warns that Demotic shall be adopted “without extremist features”. And the flavours of Standard Greek that have prevailed have waxed and waned in their archaisms in the decades since. But Greek has mostly settled down into normal registers, rather than street fighting conflict.