Nick on Quora

Preamble:

I AM NOT SAYING THIS JUST TO IMPRESS User.

Ahem.

Um, nah. It’s not objectively ugly. What name is? It’s just a bunch of phonemes. Is Melanie ugly, because it sounds like melanoma? Is Mycroft ugly, because it sounds like Microsoft?

Any ugliness we associate with names is cultural. And what’s an Anya ever done to you?

I could put in an anecdote about an Anya my wife studied with; but Quora is googleable, so I’ll pass.

What Anya is though, is unfamiliar in an English-language environment. If an English-speaking shmuck in high school hears an unfamiliar name, of course they’re going to scramble to find things about it to make fun of. Because they’re shmucks.

Now, pronouncing it as “Awnya” instead of “Ahnya”: that, I might take issue with…

Vote #1 Colin Jensen and Joe Fessenden, who have nailed it.

To add a bit.

It is the height of arrogance to fast forward to Modern Greek. But I’ll do so anyway.

In Modern Greek, the adjective askhimos < askhēmōn means ‘ugly’.

The etymology of askhēmōn is ‘un-shape-ish’. So unshapely, not with a nice shape. Deformed, as Thayer’s Lexicon put it. Not pleasant to look at.

The verb askhēmonein means ‘to act in an unshapely manner’. To act ugly. In a way that is not pleasant to experience.

You need to dig beneath the Olde English of unbecomingly, unseemly. They are correct, but you may well miss the connotations because they are Olde English. To act unbecomingly mean acting in a socially unacceptable way. It is a socially ugly way.

From the Byzantine usage I’ve seen, I’m pretty sure that includes behaviour which society (at the time) condemned as lewd, sexually ill-disciplined. But it’s not just about the sex, it’s about the ugliness.

FWIW, the LSJ (Classical Greek) definition of the verb is ‘behave unseemly, disgrace oneself’.

Um… positivity?

… You’ve A2A’d the right guy, Diane? OK. I’m a misery guts, but I appreciate the challenge!

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It was my honeymoon, last year. For her sins, I dragged my honey to my home town in Greece. I wanted her to know where I grew up.

I hadn’t been back in six years; and I hadn’t gotten to properly explore it on my previous visits back. I was trying to recapture what it was like thirty years ago, for my honey. But it kept slipping through my fingers. It seems so much smaller. Much more sullen—not just because it was in winter, but it was in the winter of Greece, resigned after years of economic crisis. The town has grown; but it seemed to me to have grown hollow.

I was dejected.

My honey instinctively knew the answer.

She took me to an eatery. Not a tourist place; a hole in the wall place, with an Asterix shopfront.

And top of the menu in the eatery is the homeliest, most unpretentious, most quotidian of dishes a Greek knows. Makaronia me kima. Spag bol. Steaming, with mincemeat, and grated white cheese.

Thank you, honey.

You can go back home, after all.

Am I surprised?

Well, let me put up my latest reaction when I discovered a correspondent was a teen. And she’s been very, very far from the first:

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-eve…

> Anyway, with regard to your question: I am seventeen, so only a year older than you.

OH FOR MOTHER FUCK’S SAKE!

ANOTHER BRILLIANT TEENAGER ON QUORA!

What is it in the water these days?! I was convinced you were in your thirties.

(That was intended as a compliment btw. But yes, I am shocked.)

Dr Nick. Smooth as ever.

But yes, I am surprised.

There’s a great old Greek expression “your brains have not yet congealed” (δεν έπηξε ακόμα το μυαλό σου), meaning that you don’t yet have the impulse control or “maturity” of an adult. Unfortunately neurology confirms that impulse control doesn’t settle until one’s mid twenties. Which is why Australians will maliciously say that a computer program “crashes more often than a 20-year old in a [Ford] Commodore”.

I will say that I very occasionally espy some elements of emotional immaturity among the intellectual teens I follow here. (And it reassures me when that does happen, that I’m not caught in some Hyperborean simulacrum.) But it’s actually quite rare. Quite astonishingly rare.

Thx4A2A, Irene. I’d say that in Armenian, but my wife doesn’t speak it. 🙁

This is a painful question for me, as I was an Esperantist for a fair while.

But even before the Espereantists split about whether the “final victory” was worth messianically waiting for, they were very careful not to convey a message that Esperanto would displace ethnic languages (even though, if the hegemony of the final victory ever happened, that would be the expected outcome). Esperanto was always meant to be a second language only.

I won’t address the fact that the hypothetical is implausible, that a common language would not unite all people, as proven by every civil war ever.

I will say that my identity as an English-speaker and a Greek-speaker is definitional to me, and I will not wish to relinquish it.

The march of technology means that we’re going to see similar challenges to our identities within our lifetimes, even if not this one. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be on the wrong side of those challenges, myself.

Vote #1 Emre Sermutlu’s answer. Because I’m just some random Greek. Emre Sermutlu’s answer to Why hasn’t Turkey adopted federalism if it is big enough and divided into seven regions?

Turkish Quorans may know me as an interested neighbour (Greek). Being Greek, the para about Turks being forced on the defensive in Emre’s answer is one that of course I’m going to disagree with. The Young Turks were plenty nationalistic on their own. The real point was that both the Young Turks and the Greeks and Armenians were not prepared to live together in a multiethnic Ottoman Empire—even if it was no longer one where the Muslims were privileged.

But with the overall tenor of Emre’s answer, of course I agree:

Different groups must like each other enough to be the part of the same structure, yet they must feel [my edit] different enough to warrant their own sub-structure.

And of course, there’s a third component. The ruling class of the country must not feel threatened by the difference of groups in the structure.

The guys in Trabzon, who Emre says will beat you up if you advocate for their autonomy, would also be sympathetic to the stunting of Turkish dialectology until fairly recently in Turkey: “There are no dialects of Turkish! There is only Turkish!”

And before anyone says anything, Greece has long done exactly the same thing.

You want an island that’s a little out of the way of mass tourism, so you can see some local music and culture. Or an island that’s big enough that not every part of it is soaked with mass tourism.

You won’t see much, this is 2016 after all. And as I posted here (Nick Nicholas’ answer to What should I know (but don’t) about the culture and history of the Cyclades in general and Syros in particular?), the indigenous dialect of the Cyclades (the most archetypal Greek islands) died out a century ago.

I actually haven’t done the Greek islands, partly because that’s exactly the kind of thing I’d be looking for, myself. I’ll make a wild guess:

• Of the Ionian islands, not Corfu, probably not Zante. Maybe Cephalonia.
• Of the Northern Aegean, Thasos and Samothrace definitely (but why would a tourist want to? 🙂 , likely Lemnos. Lesbos is big enough that there are traditional bits left, and even visible differences within the island (I’ve been there), but you have to hunt them down.
• I don’t even think of Euboea as an island, but: Euboea.
• Of the Cyclades, I’d go with any island you haven’t heard of. Folegandros, maybe, or Amorgos. But I’m guessing here.
• Of the Dodecanese, I suspect all of them; 11 of the 12 are tiny and out of the way, and the 12th, Rhodes, is big enough that something indigenous will have survived the tourists.
• Crete. Of course. Not the coast around Iraklion. Ever. But the hinterland? Yes.

Melbourne isn’t Sydney, with its really obvious, beautiful sights. It doesn’t really have any obvious, landmark attractions. It’s more atmosphere and aggregate of experience.

In the CBD: walk around the alleyways for the funky graffiti and nouveau restaurants. Stare up, and admire the Victorian and Art Deco goodness of a confident, rich city.

Walk down Southbank, especially in decent weather (when that happens): it’s a lovely, bustling promenade.

Pop up to Lygon Street, Little Italy, for the gelati and coffee culture; less now for the students from Melbourne Uni, because uni students aren’t as interesting as they used to be.

Go down to the St Kilda pier for a stroll along the beach (such as it is, this is Melbourne after all), and take in the self-conscious bohemia of Fitzroy St and Acland St. You didn’t live here in the 90s, so you won’t feel the stabbing pain in Acland St of what it used to be: a slice of the shtetl turned into deracinated hipsterville. Just enjoy the hipsterville show. If it gets too much, the shtetl is still around the corner in Carlisle St.

Walk through the myriad of public gardens and parks. The Botanical Gardens, the Fitzroy Gardens, Flagstaff.

Go to the ethnic enclaves. Little Greece in Oakleigh; Little Vietnam in Richmond; Little Turkey in Brunswick St, Little Spain in Johnston St. Eat, and eat widely: we have a critical mass of culinary diversity, and culinary innovation.

The Just-So story of antiquity is as Konstantinos Konstantinides put it: Thera the island was named for its colonist Theras, and Therasia for his daughter.

Yeah, I find that too convenient too.

I’m not looking up Pauly or anything reputable like that, but I will work from the corresponding common nouns. Thēr means a wild animal, and thēra meant the hunt, hunting for wild animals, game. Thērasios is the adjective of thēra, “of or relating to the hunt”. The feminine of Thērasios is Thērasia. So “hunt” and “hunting (island)”.

Oh, and Theresa does indeed come from the similar adjective Thēresios. It started out as a synonym of Artemis, the hunter goddess.

The mob will vote for what the mob likes. And the Quora Facebook feed will give the mob what it wants.

You’re Anon, which automatically makes you the enemy unless you’re that one Anon guy talking about Turkish, or that other Anon guy who is actually me; but I’ll answer.

Be the change.

Upvote the voices you like. Follow them and encourage them.

Know that they won’t get a mass readership, and that’s actually probably just as well. But for the topics you’re passionate about, curate good quality conversation. That includes A2Aing and asking good questions.

Post questions like, I dunno, Who are the 3 people you follow that have the fewest followers? How many followers do they have, and what are your reasons for following them? (Thank you again for the idea, Martin Silvertant.)