Author: opoudjis

Old Rhodes, 2023

By: | Post date: May 14, 2023 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Greece, Uncategorized

I don’t think I can do any better than to replicate my account of walking into the Old Town from my Facebook feed. So I’ve been in the Old Town of Rhodes for a couple of hours now. … OMG HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS PLACE BEFORE?! It is a medieval theme park, […]

Olympos, Karpathos, 2023

By: | Post date: May 14, 2023 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Greece

In lieu of a separate post on Olympos: I’d already written it on Quora. https://www.quora.com/Is-Olympos-Karpathos-in-Greece-an-authentic-village-or-is-it-rather-about-business/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5 Well, four years after proud Olymp-ian Rigopoula gave her answer, https://www.quora.com/Is-Olympos-Karpathos-in-Greece-an-authentic-village-or-is-it-rather-about-business/answer/Rig%C3%B3poula-Tsambounieris-Talarantas I’ve just paid Olympos a visit myself. Olympos is a village cut off from the rest of the island of Karpathos, which itself is somewhat cut off from the […]

Kasos, 2023

By: | Post date: May 14, 2023 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Greece, Language

Kasos is a sleepy, small place, with fishermen, old timers drinking beer, women running general stores, a couple of elderly Dutch tourists, and a few soldiers. Linguistically very heterogeneous: I did hear one local with a strong accent, as I walked past, drop a delta (ξα(δ)έρφια)—a local feature which make the local name of dolmadhes […]

Karpathos, 2023

By: | Post date: May 14, 2023 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Greece, Language

I decided to visit Karpathos on my first holiday trip, for fairly trivial reasons. Karpathos is renowned in Greek linguistics for its archaism and its diversity of dialects. I had written a paper on the dialects of the Dodecanese, in which Karpathos had played a starring role (Nicholas, N. 2004a. Η γεωγραφική ιστορία του «ίντα […]

Sitia, 2023

By: | Post date: May 7, 2023 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Greece
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My home town of Sitia is routinely described as a sleepy kind of place, and sleepy it is. Sleepy enough that I couldn’t write about my time there, until after I’d left it behind, three weeks on: its lazy cafes and brandy bars encouraged nothing so much as more brandy and more coffee. A town […]

Σταύρος Νικολάου (1936–2023)

By: | Post date: February 26, 2023 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Personal

Τις ευχαριστίες μας σε όλους εσάς που έχετε παρευρεθεί σήμερα να τιμήσετε τη μνήμη του πατέρα μου, και ιδίως στα ξαδέρφια μας Μαίρη, Στήβ και Κιμ, που ταξίδεψαν από την Τασμανία για να βρεθούν κοντά μας. Θέλω επίσης να απευθύνω εκ μέρους της μάνας μου ένα μεγάλο ευχαριστώ στους γείτονες παλαιότερους και νεότερους, που στάθηκαν […]

Why do the British and the Canadians spell check “cheque”? (Post deleted on Quora)

By: | Post date: June 15, 2022 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Language

It is delicious when hundreds (literally) of Poms puffs their chests out in pride to assert that cheque was the original spelling, and dastardly Noah Webster simplified English spelling because Americans are stupid, and pip pip, we speak English and its our language, and the Yanks perverted it, and they can’t tell check and cheque apart… … only for historical fact […]

Europeans dislike it when Americans say ‘I am Irish’ or ‘I am Italian’. What if Australians and Canadians said that? Would Europeans still dislike it? Or do they dislike it only when Americans said that?

By: | Post date: November 23, 2021 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Australia, Culture, Greece

  Answer deleted by Quora for violating Be Nice Be Respectful policy. I won’t appeal, but it needed saying. Dear denizens of the Old Continent (Γηραιά Ήπειρος, as Greeks like to call it): You discard your poor huddled masses, and you repay their passed down love and homesickness with sneering, now that you’ve grown fat. […]

How significant is Brooke Burton’s turn as the Australian Bachelorette?

By: | Post date: October 19, 2021 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Australia, Culture

The Australian Bachelorette is about to screen Season 7. Its protagonist is Brooke Blurton, who was a contestant on The Australian Bachelor Season 6. Brooke Blurton is bi, and has has made out with another former female contestant, Alex Nation, on the followup Bachelor In Paradise; so this is her third outing on the Bachelor […]

Two songs of loss

By: | Post date: March 20, 2019 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Greece, Music, Personal

I have had occasion to think, in recent times, on two songs of loss. I’ve cried to them before the loss, and I’ve thought of them ruefully after the loss, when I had no tears left. I will analyse them and discourse on them in The Other Place; and I’ll have fun doing it; and […]

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