There’s several perspectives one can take on the whole sorry-ass saga of niggardly, on which as always see Controversies about the word “niggardly”.

There’s the perspective of the linguist, the language-lover, the activist, and the anti-American.

The Anti-American first, so I can get it off my chest:

Christ, I’m glad I don’t live in your country.

Australia has a bad history with its Indigenous people, with the Melanesians it colonised, and now with the Somali refugees who are the latest marauding evil criminal youth gangs (it was the Vietnamese 20 years ago). But…

Christ, I’m glad I don’t live in your country.

More on that later.

The linguist:

If a critical mass of people within a language community think the word is unacceptable, well, then it’s unacceptable. Enough people here and in related threads have indicated that it is.

It doesn’t mean they’re etymologically right; but etymology is only one factor in how words work. There’s any number of connotations words acquire without being informed by etymology: language is a synchronic system, and connotations works synchronically.

Of course, my fellow personas Anti-American and Language-Lover don’t particularly feel they’re in the same language community as the people who object to niggardly, or even the same planet. But that’s not how it works. The word’s become a trigger for a critical mass of people, and is resulting in people reporting comments on Quora: Why would one of my comments be reported because I used the word niggardly?

Back to the Anti-American:

FFS, I don’t live in your God-forsaken country; do I have to put up with your “Is X random ethnicity white” and “niggardly is a bad word” bizarre racial obsessions here too?

The linguist:

Yes. Yes you do.

Well, not the former one. But yes, because you’re still part of the same language community.

The language-lover:

Niggardly is a useful word. And it’s useful because of its added connotations: it says things that miserly doesn’t. In particular, it (probably) comes from the same Scandinavian word as niggling does, and it has the connotations of niggling that miserly does not: pedantic, fussing over details, penny-pinching.

The linguist:

Yeah. But connotations work both ways. And now it has the added connotations of “that word that that guy in DC got fired over”, and “that word that sounds like nigger”. Because connotations work synchronically and not just etymologically.

The Anti-American:

In fricking America it does. And not to all Americans either, just a vocal minority of whingers.

The linguist:

And you’re still stuck in the same language community as them.

Note also that the negative connotations have taken over, because niggardly was not a common word to begin with.

The activist:

…

The Anti-American:

Nick, pull the other one mate. You’re not an activist.

The observer of activism:

I note with interest the initial reaction of the late Julian Bond, head of the NAACP at the time, to the Ground Zero incident in 1999, where the guy was fired: (Controversies about the word “niggardly”)

Julian Bond, then chairman of the NAACP, deplored the offense that had been taken at Howard’s use of the word. “You hate to think you have to censor your language to meet other people’s lack of understanding”, he said. “David Howard should not have quit. Mayor Williams should bring him back—and order dictionaries issued to all staff who need them.”

Bond also said, “Seems to me the mayor has been niggardly in his judgment on the issue” and that as a nation the US has a “hair-trigger sensibility” on race that can be tripped by both real and false grievances.

Now I like what Bond said for a couple of reasons. One, because I’m a libertarian in matters of free speech—more so than is usual in contemporary Australia. In fact, you might even say…

The Anti-American:

Don’t! Don’t do it! Don’t say anything good about America EVERRRR!

The observer of activism:

Two, because politically, I don’t think you win the battle of ideas by censorship, or by being seen as hypersensitive (“false grievances”): you win the battle of ideas by argument, not by distractions.

The language-lover:

Three, because Bond liked dictionaries. In fact, he thought all staff should have them.

The Anti-American:

Yeah. Sounds like Bond was a great American, and displayed many of the virtues some people grudgingly admire about Seppoland. (Not me of course.)

The linguist:

Australian English Seppoland < Seppo < Septic tank < Rhyming slang for Yank < Yankee < Dutch Janke < Jan < Latin Ioannes < Hebrew Yohanan.

The language-lover:

Language. It’s a beautiful thing.

The Anti-American:

Christ, I’m glad I don’t live in your country.

Latin would help more. And it’s a bit of a sledgehammer to adopt with your English vocab: you certainly don’t need all the Greek grammar that goes with learning Greek. It helps in scholarly vocabulary, but Greek is no longer a very productive source of new coinages; it would be more helpful just to familiarise yourself with particular technical vocabularies, where you’ll see the same Greek roots recurring.

There’s a couple of lists out there of ASCII approximations of Unicode punctuation, including:

• Lexical Tools
• https://lexsrv3.nlm.nih.gov/LexS…
• Replacing unicode punctuation with ASCII approximations

None of them include (C) and (R), irritatingly.

If you want ASCII approximations of other scripts, you’re getting into ASCII Romanisations, such as Greeklish, Fingilish, 3arabizi, etc.; see Category:Romanization by script

1. McKayla Kennedy is awesome and considered and thoughtful, and I don’t like surfacing disagreements with her, particularly when my response is impulsive and emotive and rash.
2. There are legitimate uses of anonymity even in seemingly innocuous topics. A very cluey poster on Turkic languages goes anon, because he doesn’t want the grief from Turkish nationalists, for example. It is a sliding scale of risk.
3. But, in topics and contexts where a Reasonable Person would not see the point of anonymity, and in a Quora where, as Laura Hale diagnosed, there’s between 30 and 50% of all questions being asked anonymously—

—yes, I do think it says something. It says that people don’t want their eponymous identity associated with what they post online, not because it’s particularly risky, but because that’s their intrinsic sense of privacy. It’s the people who don’t want to submit to the Real Name policy, and use anonymity instead of the now unavailable pseudonymity.

If you’re not judgemental, it still says about them that they don’t want to be publicly accountable for their contributions to Quora. If you’re judgemental like me, it says that they are not part of my tribe: they are not people who engage on the site in the same way I do.

McKayla, you posted a hierarchy of Quora users: McKayla Kennedy’s answer to How is Quora stratified below the Top Writer level? I’m delighted to quote you:

Anonymouses—frankly, they don’t rank on the scale at all because none of their answers are connectable. They are like ghosts, some good spirits and some bad, but necessary nonetheless. Collectively, they are viewed with vague distrust.

In fact, you remind me of the Greek fairy tale depictions of fairies or Africans: sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent, but always alien.

No. Australia.

People loathe the pissing contest between Hitler and Stalin that always arises with these questions, but it’s curiously absent from this thread. So:

Stalin.

Because with Hitler, at least you knew who the enemies were throughout his reign. With Stalin, the enemies changed depending on what side of bed he got up on. If both are evil, I’ll fear evil + unpredictable more than evil + predictable.

Supplemental to the list given by David Rosson (ah, your American bias is showing, David 🙂

cc C (Selva) R.Selvakumar

• As Dmitriy Genzel points out, Historical Linguistics is an observational science, like Astronomy. A lot of hypothesis testing though.
• To add to Tibor Kiss’ list of German words, Linguistic Typology is a Versammelnde Wissenschaft: a science based on data collection. Like biological taxonomy.
• Semantics, depending on the flavour of Semantics being done, is an observational science (lexicography), or logic, or philosophy.
• Pragmatics is something in between cultural anthropology and philosophy (but a very cool, nuts-and-bolts philosophy).
• Discourse Analysis is observational science, but with dirtier data.

Oh, and phoneticians’ papers look just like psychology papers. Four pages long, with graphs. Historical linguists’ papers are old-school chatty. Syntax papers have at least some pretence of rigour. The style of the papers lines up to the kinds of science (or Geistwissenschaft) their subdisciplines aspire to be.

There’s a slight factor, which Chris Lo has already pointed out in comments, but it’s only slight.

Spanish does not have length contrast in vowels or consonants. As a result it is syllable-timed, and it is spoken quite fast.

Italian has audible vowel length differences (stresses vs unstressed), and also long and short consonants. That makes it spoken a bit slower, and there’s more phonetic variety, which (for me) makes it a bit easier to pick out words.

Originally Answered:

Why has Quora moderation removed my question?

Like Konstantinos Konstantinides said, if we don’t know what the question was, we can’t help.

But the right place to get help is likely:

Need help wording a Quora question?

I am dismayed at many of the answers here.

I am 45. I was never more intelligent, more vital, more curious, more positive, more engaged, than when I was…

… actually, than when I was 25. But I was still pretty damn impressive at 18. And I read a hell of a lot more literature.

It’s true, as the renowned party poopers on this thread have put it, that your brain development is still ongoing at 18; as Kazantzakis would put it in Greek, your brain “has not yet congealed.” But that’s nothing to do with intellect; that’s to do with impulse control, and experience. The only thing that I grew in mentally since 18 was reserve.

Or selling out, as my youthful self would put it. And it wouldn’t necessarily be unfair.

Two of my favourite Quorans were my favourites before I had any idea of their age: Lara Novakov and Dimitris Almyrantis. The only reason I’m not adding Sierra Spaulding to that list is because I don’t care as much about US electoral politics as she and Michael Masiello do, so I haven’t followed her as closely as he has. (I’m looking forward to what she says on Quora past November 🙂

All of them have occasionally (very occasionally) said things to make me wince (just as any number of 60-year olds here have); but none of them have said anything to make me not take them seriously. And the same goes for any number of other teens I may have bumped into here, realising it or not.

Are they outliers, as party poopers here have harrumphed? Sure.

But aren’t we all?

P.J. O’Rourke was in town recently. He was explaining Trump and the resentment of the elites to us Antipodeans, in an ABC chat show (Q&A). And he pointed out that everyone in the audience was by definition in the resented elite, simply because they were interested in politics.

These are people posting, intelligently and vibrantly, about Ottoman history and Serbian daily life and American politics, on a forum defined by its braininess. On a forum that by definition counts as the resented elite. They’ve earned the respect I give them.