This has come up with regard to Eric Barnes, who passed on in May (from his blog: Death of The Captain, Gaijinass from Beyond the Grave)
The latest information I’ve heard is that this is done only in response to a request from the deceased’s family. I have not had direct communication from Quora staff on this issue yet, and some clarity from the organisation would be welcome. I will update this answer if I hear something further.
We can subscribe to The Quora Memorial, and post our memories of the deceased as comments there. That’s a start.
Dion Shaw’s answer of commemorative blogs is an excellent suggestion.
And in your own content, continue to echo them. Link to their answers, praise their insights, keep their presence on the site evergreen. Don’t expect the site to do so for us.
Do so, not for those who have passed. Do so, for us. Because we do care, when one of our number is no longer among us.
Let me answer a different question.
As I wrote on A cis lament for the Greek language and How to say transgender in Greek, the Greek language has a Greek term for transgender, diemphylikos. Trans Greeks were involved in coining it.
The Greek peak body of LGB (with only token T) uses diemphylikos.
Greek trans groups, including the very people who came up with diemphylikos, refuse to use it, and use transdzender and trans instead.
Why? Because they did not want a self-designation that sounded like a medical diagnosis.
And while my cis Greek linguistician heart bleeds to hear it, I understand that.
That’s also why gays don’t call themselves homosexuals.
And as frustrated as they have had reason to be with heterosexuals, that’s also why they don’t call heterosexuals heterosexuals, or for that matter why heterosexuals don’t call themselves heterosexuals. It’s not a colloquial term. It is a scholarly term.
Oh, and as enough answers have already said: words change meaning, and more importantly, words change connotations. People really don’t think of straight as either defensively positive, or derogatorily negative. It’s just the colloquial term for heterosexual now; the social circumstances around it have changed, and so has the understanding of it. If the connotations of conventionality and rectitude were paramount, the expression straight but not narrow would be unintelligible.
While adding credentials is easy, per How can I add credentials on Quora?, adding credentials to the satisfaction of the Quora Credential Bot, which stealth collapses your pre-existing bios and your recently edited credentials, is so opaque, that Mike Bowerbank’s answer is not useful. Sure, it’s real easy to create a credential that will get instacollapsed and ignored by Quora; but that doesn’t get us anywhere.
Quora credentials are hard to edit and create, because when the Quora Design team put together their metrics for how they would call the rollout a success, those metrics did not include writers being able to change their credentials easily. Or even becoming aware that there was a problem with your credentials to begin with.
Designing Your Own Metrics by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Design
Why yes. When you design your own metrics so that any pre-existing bio that didn’t match your criteria gets silently suppressed, and you don’t have to count it in your metrics, of course you’re going to call whatever the hell happened a victory. Like old man Tacitus said: solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. They create desolation and they call it peace.
(If any of this is news to you, go to your Profile, and hit Edit under credentials. If you see a whole lot of yellow triangles? That’s the UX experts of Quora silently suppressing your bios as “unhelpful”, and not bothering to let you know about it.)
How does Jackson’s essay start?
Designers are often skeptical about the metrics that guide product development, and for good reason: organizations frequently choose metrics that are bad proxies for long-term value to their customers or users.
Indeed. And yet, those metrics keep happening.
So. Reason #1 why Quora credentials are so hard to edit or create: an approach to UX design at Quora that consistently ignores its writers. Not its users: its writers…
if Bios weren’t accurately representing an author’s relationship to a question, and we just work on getting more and more of them, it could lead to readers seeing many unhelpful bios on Quora, lowering their overall trust in the product.
And with this, we realise, yet again, that the users Quora UX design for are not the writers: writers are fungible fools, who will put up with whatever crap is ladled to them in the interface. The only users that matter to Quora UX are the passive readers who stumble onto the answers, and onto that sweet, sweet advertiser clickbait.
It let us more accurately measure what we intended – good experiences for readers – without having to throw measurement out all together.
Good experience for readers.
Not for you.
Reason #2: Opacity in what the Credentials Bot expects to see in credentials. Best guess is, Quora wants a lot less levity, and a lot more academic or professional-looking credentials. If you put in “PhD Linguistics, Univ. of Melbourne, 1998”, you’re probably safe. If you put in a phrase in the English language, you may well not be safe. If you put in a pithy one or two word apophthegm, you’re probably not safe. But of course, Quora never does any onboarding, and they didn’t do any onboarding of what kinds of credentials they like to see:
With no link to what is helpful? With me having to do trial and error to work out what you consider helpful? And with no clear pattern discernible from the credentials that don’t get rejected?
And with no answer from Quora to the ostensively relevant questions, just user confusion?
As we say in Klingon: HIchop. Bite me.
Zeibura S. Kathau has asked that I mix up the Greek proverbial wisdom with which I decry Quora UX idiocy with some Klingon.
yIvoq ’ach yI’ol. Trust, but verify.
yIvoq ’ach lojmItmey yISam. Trust, but locate the doors.
This question has been asked in the aftermath of BadHombreBotGate. That’s…
Oooooookay.
Quora 2.0.
Implemented by the same guys who implemented Quora 1.0, and have been feeding Bug? or Feature? with material ever since?
Nothing. Please, God, Nothing. Just. Don’t. Touch. It. It’s kinda working for now; let’s not add any more superduper “enhancements.”
… Although maybe do bring back the pee-coloured notifications. They were funny.
So, it’s turned to yellow now – the notification background. by Kathleen Grace on Bug? or Feature?
The Greek word for ‘elope’ is indeed klevome: ‘to steal each other’. In my mother’s village, my impression is there were more elopements than weddings with parents’ full-throated approval.
Elope. Another word rendered obsolete by societal change. I’m sure it sounds as quaint to most Westerners now as betrothal and godsiblings…
Pizer is listed in Patrick Hanks’ American Dictionary of Family Names, with two provenances. As an English surname, it is a variant of Peyser, and and its etymology is available online. As a Jewish surname, its etymology is given as unknown. From online searches, I couldn’t even tell whether it was Ashkenazi or Sephardi.
So, I don’t know, and it looks like a lot of people don’t know either.
I’m to take seriously a doctor’s tongue-in-cheek commentary in a medical journal, as evidence that Modern Greek is not descended from Ancient Greek? Quoting a phrase book as his authority?
Over an answer with contributions from several good minds that know both languages, including some (like me) with academic training in linguistics?
Really?
A guy that says
Latin is experiencing something of a revival as a subject for serious study, and it lives on in the everyday language of much of southern Europe.
?!?!
Latinene loquuntur in Siciliâ? Praeclarum! Eamus pizzam edendum!
I registered to the Lancet. Resuscitating dead languages says all of the following:
And Greek? My phrase book asserts that “Modern Greek is not nearly as difficult as it looks”. Possibly, but ancient Greek looks more dead than old Latin. To the burden of alien letters and baffling accents has to be added changes in pronunciation. Physicians-in-the-making may pick up all sorts of things on vacation by the Mediterranean but not, I fear, medical etymology. The science writer Lancelot Hogben tried to present the derivation of common scientific terms in a systematic way, but his book is out of print. Before a classically educated generation of physicians dies away entirely perhaps one of them could do something thorough for medicine, as an educational tool.
He is not saying Modern Greek is not similar to Ancient, let alone that it is not descended from Ancient Greek. (Good Christ.) He’s saying that it’s changed a fair bit, and it has. But he’s not saying it in a way that deserves to be taken seriously.
Burden of alien letters and baffling accents? Vacation by the Mediterranean?! This is not an argument. This is not particularly funny either, and as an Australian, I thought I got British humour.
At least he namechecks Hogben. I loved that guy’s conlang.
It is true that David Sharp, vacationing in Malia sans doute and sneering at the locals’ alien letters and baffling accents, would not hear all the Greek vocabulary of medicine from the local peasantry waiting upon him. (He wouldn’t hear none of it, either.) And yes, Ancient Greek is dead; just as Shakespearean Fricking English is.
But if you want an answer on whether Ancient and Modern Greek are similar, take the counsel of your learnèd fellow Quorans in How different is the Ancient Greek language from the modern Greek language? Can any Greek-speaking people testify if they understand classical Greek of Homer, et al? (and its two dozen merged questions), over a medico who thinks the following counts as wit:
When last I saw the Aegean it looked more like the froth on lager, but around the time of the Trojan wars it was a “wine dark sea”. Poor translation, colour blindness-or did wine in Homer’s day really look like that? The Nauticos project has identified amphorae in this ruined ship—indeed the Mediterranean sea-bed is littered with these huge pots. Those accident-prone ancient merchant seamen did not hug the coastline, as long suspected, but intrepidly carried wine (and olive oil too) across far deeper waters, spilling some en route.
And don’t get me started on Illiterature and medicine, the squib that somehow prompted David Sharp’s squib:
My advice is to drop a sicknote on literature-and-medicine lecture days in college, and with journals hasten to the educational delights of obituary pages. I’m sure there is nothing wrong with literature, and that even the most delicate child can be trusted with it; and I’ll defend to my last gasp anyone’s right to read it (although, maybe, not to write it). But literature’s relevance to coping with people in the Monday morning surgery queue is nil—unless they happen to be very old Russians.
Screw you too, buddy.
That squib by John Bignall does not even mention classical languages: how on earth did David Sharp used it as a springboard for his excursus?
This curricular fad relates largely to living languages but perhaps dead ones have more to offer directly since so many medical terms come from Latin or ancient Greek, with the occasional mongrel admitting to both types of parent.
… That’s a segue?
I am brand new to the ways of the Lancet. Do they do this kind of thing a lot in their squibs?
Coz if they actually paid attention during those literature-and-medicine lecture days in college, their squibs might be better literature. Certainly funnier. And with less WTF segues.
and I’ll defend to my last gasp anyone’s right to read it (although, maybe, not to write it)
Indeed.
The answer, by the way, is yes. Modern Greek is similar to Ancient Greek, in the way that Modern English is similar to Middle English.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
siþen þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at troye
þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondez and askez
þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroȝt
watz tried for his tricherie þe trewest on erþe
hit watz ennias þe athel and his highe kynde
þat siþen depreced prouinces and patrounes bicome
welneȝe of al þe wele in þe west iles
Have I ever muted or blocked prolific and popular Quorans?
Well, what would the point be of muting or blocking taciturn and unpopular Quorans? The whole point is to get people off of my feed that I keep seeing there, and I don’t want to.
Blocks are the results of heavy altercations, and of course Quora doesn’t let you see who you’ve blocked in one place. But I do tend to both mute and block.
The one benign mute I was going to report, I seem to have undone. It was Rob Weir. I am a statist liberal by American standards, but somewhat libertarian by Australian standards, and I wanted to know a bit more about libertarianism. So I started reading Rob Weir’s stuff. And upvoting it, even if I didn’t always like it.
And then Quora turned my feed into Weirapalooza. It was Weir 24/7. It was Weir plus Weir followed by more Weir, and none of it was Thomas Wier, who isn’t spelled the same anyway. It was Beat Back Leviathan: The Movie. It was a Gary Johnson convention. It was Galtgulchageddon.
I wanted to know a bit more about libertarianism: I did not want to be put on the mailing list. I ended up muting him, but I never blocked him, and I felt guilty enough that I unmuted him a year later.
Of the other extremely popular and prolific Quorans… hm, can’t name names, eh.
Interesting: I mute 11 accounts, and block almost all of them. 6 of them have blocked me back, 2 I didn’t know about until now. Three are blocking me because of me being a Quora critic; they have had no other interaction with me. One might be that, or it might be because I called them out by name for a misdeed, in the company of many others. One blocks me because I blocked them and they found out; they were at least civil about it, which I respect (but not enough to unblock them 🙂
I’ll make it +5k followers. That brings it down to 7.
I’m interested to see that I haven’t muted anyone for being a conservative, and I have muted at least two people who ostensibly are on my side of politics. My feed has done the muting of the opposite side of politics for me. 🙁 (No, not proud of that.) I did block someone for attacking me quite patronisingly when I defended the Australian gummint taking away our guns; but it was the attack that did it, not the “ammosexuality”. And one of the Quora defenders is conservative enough to make me dislike his writings, but that wasn’t why either.
The five answers given quote the facts, but I’m afraid they don’t understand the facts.
Nigh comes from the original Old English word for “near”.
Near comes from the Old Norse for “nearer”. It came to England with the Vikings.
They are not the same etymology. They are related (cognate) words, just as shirt from Old English and skirt from Old Norse are related: but the last time they constituted the selfsame word (ignoring that one is a comparative) was in proto-Germanic. In 800, when the Vikings came to England, English nēah and Norse nær were two separate words from two separate languages.
My thanks to Syarif Fadhlurrahman for his clarification in comments.
Near comes from Old English with some influence from Old Norse. It’s not totally from Old Norse:
‘nigh’
ON: ná
OE: neah‘nearer’
ON: nær
OE: near‘nearest’
ON: ‘næst’
OE: ‘niehst’Granted, Oxford assigns only the Old Norse etymology, but I don’t see why. Perhaps due to non-adjectival use? (Old Norse ‘naer’ can function as adverb and preposition)