Nick on Quora

Half of Greece (the islands) was a colonial outpost for various Italian republics—mostly Venice and Genoa. But that was a very, very long time ago, and Greeks have forgotten that, for example, Cretan villagers welcomed the Ottomans as relief from Venetian feudalism. What was left behind was significant cultural transmission from Italy to Greece: a lot of vocabulary, and some material culture, again particularly in the islands.

For example,

Crete is famous for its small cheese or herb pies, called Kalitsounia. They resemble a common cheese or stuffed pie with the principal difference of its filling and serving variations.

I only worked out last year where the word comes from.

Calzone. And, Wikipedia tells me, Calisson.

So there is cultural familiarity. There’s some shared vocabulary. There’s physical similarities. And as Konstantinos Konstantinides points out, there’s no recent border hostilities, apart from WWII. (And when Griko-speaking Italians were part of the occupying forces, Greeks were delighted to meet them: “You can’t be fascisti! You’re our brothers!”)

As Dimitrios Michmizos says, “worthy” is the best translation; “worthy” is not about one’s worth, “valuable”, but about one’s merit. It certainly isn’t idiomatic in English as an acclamation, though.

Konstantinos Konstantinides points to the added gloss “deserved”; and while it is not a common expression in English, you will occasionally see the exclamation “Well deserved!”

Seth’s Blog: “Well deserved”

“Congratulations” is fine for winning the lottery, but “well deserved” is reserved for people who put in the effort and the time and took the risk to get somewhere.

Bauer’s Lexicon defines ἀρραβών as “payment of part of a purchase price in advance; first installment, deposit, down payment, pledge”. In time, the meaning has shifted to the kind of pledge associated with marriage: a betrothal, an engagement.

(Greeks, please do not cite Ancient words with Modern inflections. It’s just confusing to those not as blessed as you to speak Modern Greek.)

The word actually entered Greek in the classical era; it is used by the Attic orators like Isaeus and Antiphon; so it would likeliest have come in from Phoenecian, not Hebrew. Liddell-Scott does indeed cite the Hebrew as ’ērābōn.

And that word is 6162. עֲרָבוֹן (erabon) — a pledge .

I get that it’s a poem by a Christian, that it mentions feeling abandoned by God and the Virgin Mary, that it alludes to God-in-the-Whirlwind from Job in the context of enduring fury and desperation, and that religion is shown as a temporary respite in the end.

But that doesn’t sound like a poem encapsulating Christianity (Michael Masiello’s answer to How can I stop hating religions and God?); it sounds like a poem written by a Christian, having a crisis of faith in Christianity.

Magister?

Fanaticism. A “dyed” Olympiakos supporter (βαμμένος Ολυμπιακός) is a die-hard Olympiakos fan, not an embittered Olympiakos fan. From the Triantafyllidis dictionary:

Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής

3. (μππ.) φανατισμένος οπαδός (πολιτικής παράταξης, ποδοσφαιρικής ομάδας κ.ά.): Είναι βαμμένος αριστερός / φασίστας / Ολυμπιακός.

Fanatical supporter (of a political party, a football team, etc): he’s a ‘dyed’ left-winger/fascist/Olympiakos [fan].

A ‘dyed’ fascist might also be rancorous because their ideology is not getting through; but you can certainly be a ‘dyed’ support when your party is in government, or your team is winning the championship.

EDIT: the expression is also in English: a dyed-in-the-wool Liverpool fan.

Greeks (OK, Byzantines) gave the Russians Orthodoxy, and feel a bond with them out of that. During Ottoman rule, the Russians saw themselves as the Third Rome—the successor state to Byzantium, which the Greeks felt was their lost empire. The Greeks in turn longed to be rescued by the Russians:

Ακόμη τούτην άνοιξη (ραγιάδες, ραγιάδες)
τούτο το καλοκαίρι (Μωρηά και Ρούμελη),
Οσο νάρθει ο Μόσκοβος (ραγιάδες ραγιάδες)
να φέρει το σεφέρι (Μωρηά και Ρούμελη)!

Just one more spring (ye slaves, ye slaves),
just one more summertime (Morea and Rumeli),
Till Moscow comes
bringing the army down.

The Greeks certainly remember the Orlov Revolt of 1770 a lot more clearly than the Russians do.

See Can you upload audio files as part of your Quora question?.

Vocaroo | Online voice recorder has become popular here lately in answers on “what does your accent sound like”.

I reluctantly agree with Konstantinos that the question should not be a “what sound is this”: not exactly googleable, and I have seen questions like this torpedoed. If the sound *illustrates* what you’re asking about, that’s different.

It’s an old surname: a scribe Niketas Mavronis is recorded in 1285: Σημειώματα-Κώδικες – View Simeioma

The stem is pretty clearly μαύρος “black, swarthy”; the -vr- is something of a giveaway, and the name doesn’t particularly look Slavonic or Aromanian. (1285 is too early for Arvanite or Turkish.) The -ώνης could mean the surname is derived from μαυρώνω “to blacken”, but that looks forced.

Most plausibly, -ώνης is some sort of diminutive or name suffix. This site ΤΑ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΕΠΩΝΥΜΑ‏ μια μελέτη και η Ιστορία τους. explains the suffix of Κοτσώνης Kotsonis as a diminutive of Kotsos < Kostas, adducing the colloquial diminutive (neuter) κλεφτρόνι “little thief”, and the surnames Γεωργιώνης, Γιαννακαρώνης, Διακώνης, Δροσώνης (from George, Big Little John, Deacon, Fresh [proper name]).

Hilarity abounds about #censusfail, the crash of the online census on August 9 2016: Census in Australia. And I will admit that, like millions of Australians that were under the impression we had to complete the census on that night (so the whole country hit the same server at 8 PM), I had a lot of merriment following the #censusfail hashtag on Twitter in between hitting Refresh (and the occasional ping).

But as a kinda public servant, I’m saddened. I’m saddened that the public’s trust in the Australian Bureau of Statistics has been trashed. I’m saddened that the data quality of the 2016 census will take a severe beating. I’m saddened that the census has ended up politicised.

Many people (particularly my fellow public servants) have been blaming the government for this, for stripping the ABS of funding. And yes, the rush to doing the census online was motivated by cost-cutting rather than efficiency. But the hubris and miscommunications out of the ABS, about the ability of their systems to deal with the load, aren’t the government’s fault. And no, I don’t buy it that hackerz brought the site down, rather than having five million citizens log in at once. Few Australians do.

[MEME DELETED]

“1 Million Forms Per Hour”: the amount of traffic the ABS stress-tested for. Double their expected volume. A fifth of the volume expected by anybody else.

I hate to agree with anything Newscorp publishes, but this nails it: http://www.news.com.au/technolog…

AUSTRALIA just lost something rare. The Census was one of the national institutions we truly trusted. Now that trust is gone.

Quora Inc stepping out of the echo chamber of wherever it’s getting its feedback from (not www.facebook. com/groups/quoratopwriters “Quora Top Writers”, and I doubt it’s even www.facebook. com/groups/quorawriters/ “Quora Writers Feedback”),

and instead, looking at answers on Quora, to questions like this.

Or this: What are the things on Quora that annoy you?

Or this: How could Quora be improved? If you were running the product/technology team at Quora, what would you do to improve the service?

Or this: What features would make Quora better?

Or this: What currently annoys you about Quora (2016)?

Or this: Rage against Quora