Nick on Quora

What are your reasons for doing so?

• Opacity of moderation.
• Lack of Quora staff engagement with writers.
• Commoditisation of the community.
• Opaque corporate direction, and what I can see, I don’t like.
• Mistrust of Quora longevity.
• Everything that Scott Welch has ever said about Quora.
• In sum: what Quora Inc does—or fails to do

What are not your reasons for doing so?

• The failings of the Quora community:
• Lapses in BRNB (I’ve been online for 25 years, I can deal)
• Low quality questions, particularly in my home fields
• Anon (though I take solace in lampooning Anon when they deserve it)
• Controversies (I keep well away, I’m a pretty irenic sort)
• Homework questions
• Mistargeted A2As
• The astonishingly poor research done on some questions (that often ends up being an incentive for me to do better).

How long has this been a consideration?

• Since Jimmy Liu was banned, so two months ago. On strike in support of Jay Liu by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile, I will not hit your Report button by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile. The first ban of someone I followed, which got me researching the innards of Quora.
• No, I’m not fricking over it.

What prevents you from doing so?

• The friends I’ve made. I love youse guys by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile. (I’ll update it eventually.)
• The writers I’ve admired from a safe distance.
• The opportunities to do research and learn something.

How long have you been active in Quora?

• A year this month

What Topics do you most frequent?

• Not US politics
• Definitely not anything to do with guns
• Nothing to do with theism/atheism. (Academic interest in religion as an atheist is fine.)
• Language stuff
• Greek stuff
• Increasingly, Quora meta-debates
• Occasionally, music and conlangs

There is one Quoran who upvotes just about everything I write (or at least, did the first few months I was here). He’s one of the few Quorans I knew online pre-Quora. I appreciate it: I regard him as my Quora sponsor.

There are Quorans I consider close Quora-friends, and I upvote most of their stuff I see in my feed, as a mark of group loyalty. Not all of it; if it was unspectacular, or trollish, or something I both disagree with and think was not well argued, I’ll decline to upvote. And hope they don’t notice. I don’t want to upvote automatically, but I will upvote by default.

In both cases, these are people I’ve gotten to know already. If some random starts upvoting me lots, well, I’ll make a point of getting to know them; but if we have that kind of overlapping interests, my experience until now has been that I already have gotten to know them.

As for comments: no, I cherish comments. If anything, I am the one creeping out other people with comments. Some people make it clear that they appreciate the banter, and reciprocate. Some people make it clear that they don’t; well, their loss.

Patriarch Cyril Lucaris made overtures towards Calvinist theologians in the 1620s, and many though not all specialists believe he was pursuing a reform of the church along Calvinist lines. His contemporaries certainly thought so, and attributed the Calvinist Confession of Cyril Lucaris to him.

The Synod of Jerusalem (1672) repudiated both the Confession, and Cyril’s authorship of the Confession, three decades after Cyril’s execution.

In addition to the answers from Elke Weiss and Niko Vasileas, note the wrinkle thrown up by Sheol: there is some evidence that Sheol is anthropomorphic in the Hebrew Scriptures, with a womb, a hand, and a mouth.

So Sheol corresponds to the House of Hades, the place (as indeed is the Christian usage of Hades: Christian views on Hades). But the Septuagint translators might have had motivation to map Sheol to Hades himself.

You can use a diacritic only when it’s necessary to prevent confusion, or you can use a diacritic consistently, whenever the pronunciation goes one way rather than the other. In the former case, you reduce the number of diacritics in the language. In the latter case, you reduce the amount of pronunciation ambiguity.

English has a spelling system insane enough to be quite comfortable with pronunciation ambiguity (the more English historical phonology I learn, the more annoyed I get about it). And diacritics have never taken off in English. So the move to avoid diaereses within English, in general, makes sense: Diaeresis (diacritic).

But that’s one language community’s decision. It’s also why Pinyin users aren’t too fussed about <ü>. German does not think the same way about <ü>; and many languages value lack of ambiguity over avoiding diacritics. They don’t want to have to think about how the word is pronounced; if you have to think, you might as well use ideograms.

That’s the general principles. In the 19th century, English was friendlier towards diacritics; hence the profusion of graves like learnèd and diaereses like naïve.

Why does the New Yorker persist in the 21st century, against the global trend in English orthography?

I give you: the New Yorker logo.

It’s a consciously old-fashioned affectation. Of the kind that the New Yorker hopes its readers will find cute.

If your grammar is bad (or even quirky), the grammar bot is going to ding questions as meeting improvement, based on the question. Automatically, because it is a bot. And regardless of whether you’ve posted anonymously or not, because it is a bot. If you edit the question, the “needing improvement” goes away; if the question is still ungrammatical, the “needing improvement” will eventually come back.

The bot has a fairly rudimentary understanding of grammar, and will ding questions even for things like apposition.

I have plenty of issues with Quora moderation, but dinging you for grammar is not really Quora moderation’s style; Occam’s Razor dictates that it’s the bot. Try dumbing down the syntax of the question, and refer to

What should I do if Quora marks my question as “Needs Improvement”?

Also, seek advice from the helpful folks at

Need help wording a Quora question?

It’s a fascinating question, and I don’t know that there is an existing word.

Partly, that’s sexism, and partly, that’s the bias of historical linguistics in explaining derivation: Martina is the “feminine variant” or “feminisation” of Martin, and it doesn’t occur to people to describe the relationship of Martin back to Martina. In the rare instances where a masculine name is derived from a feminine (Catarino < Caterina is the only one that occurs to me), I still think noone has bothered to describe the pair Caterina, Catarino as anything.

Zeibura S. Kathau, I miss having the kinds of pub conversations you’re having.

I like Uri Segal’s zeugonym, and Audrey Ackerman’s didymonym. (Haven’t seen you in my feed in a while, Audrey, but that’s because I’ve muted Game of Thrones 🙂

Heterophylonym “other gender” is the pedantic answer, but it’s too long. Heteronym is already taken; how about phylonym “gender name”? (Phylon is both “tribe”, hence phylum, and “gender”.) There seems to be only very little usage of phylonym in the sense of “phylum”.

Genos has a similar ambiguity between “generation” and “gender”, and to my surprise genonym is already defined to mean a generational name: An Alphabetical Guide to the Language of Name Studies.

There is a gender-neutral word for sibling in Modern Greek, αδέρφι /aðerfi/, derived from the Ancient neuter diminutive ἀδέλφιον /adelpʰion/. But that word is first attested in the second century AD. So Chad’s answer stands.

Kissinger undermined Rogers at every opportunity because he was profoundly insecure. Kissinger would yell at anyone available (quite often Haldeman) for hours about slights, real and imaginary. The story of Kissinger’s time as National Security Adviser was a story of constant tussling with Rogers, and making sure Rogers was kept in the dark.

Nixon initially undermined Rogers so that the White House, not the Secretary of State, would have control of foreign policy, which was all that he really cared about. It’s why he deliberate chose a former business partner who knew nothing of foreign policy. Of course, once Kissinger became too big for his boots, Nixon found he needed to undermine Kissinger too, and very rarely he would side with Rogers against Kissinger.

It’s an awful question to pose, to pick just one (or even several). I’m forcing myself to limit myself to five:

• The 2nd movement of the Ninth: a dialectic of nostalgia and dissolution, of wistfulness and nihilism.
• The 1st movement of the Ninth: an astonishing accomplishment both formally (everything is in the first two bars) and emotionally: a full symphony in itself, suffused with resignation and struggle.
• The Andante movement of the Sixth (though they’re all amazing): all that is great and lofty about passion and sorrow.
• The scherzo of the Fifth: music to create universes by (and watch them perish as quickly as they materialised).
• The 1st movement of the Fourth: a joyful, lilting, classical-sized whirlygig (and again, a great formal construction).

If I’d allowed myself 10: the 3rd movement of the First; the 3rd and 4th movement of the Second; the 1st movement of the Third; the last movement of the Ninth. (Or of the Third. Or of the Sixth. Not easy….)