Positive Politeness vs Negative Politeness. What say you Wikipedia? Negative politeness: Making a request less infringing, such as “If you don’t mind…” or “If it isn’t too much trouble…”; respects a person’s right to act freely. In other words, deference. There is a greater use of indirect speech acts. Positive politeness: Seeks to establish a […]
That we are still, 52 years after the book was published, The Lucky Country. Which is meant to be a bad thing: prospering through luck, rather than competent planning. The original indictment the author intended was that the luck was inertia in following British habits—Australia Forrest Gump’d it into prosperity. The popular understanding is that […]
Just to chime in with Achilleas Vortselas’ answer: I’m not sure Brits know how big a deal it has been for Greeks to embrace a European identity. Or Germans or Spaniards or Poles, but it was a seismic shift for Greeks. Because of that investment, Achilleas is spot on: continental Europeans will feel massively betrayed. […]
Three Finns and a bottle of vodka. They drink in silence for three hours. After three hours, one Finn says: “Nice vodka.” The other Finn says, “Did we come here to talk, or did we come here to drink?!” Mayakovsky was acting like an avantgarde artist (or, as we call it in my country, an […]
Answering as a Greek. The Greek humorist Freddy Germanos (Φρέντυ Γερμανός, Freddie Germanos), God rest him, visited Denmark in the ’60s. This was his take on OP’s question (Ταξίδι στην Δανία, from the collection Το Δις Εξαμαρτείν): The first thing you work out in Scandinavia is that the Danes do not adore the Swedes and […]
Jocular answer: When I was spending three years in the wilds of Orange County, US, I was hankering for the culinary variety of Old Melbourne Town. I kept telling anyone who would listen (and that wasn’t many) about how when I’d go back, eat at my favourite Malay-Chinese restaurant on Lygon St, and swim on […]
The warlike Māori arrived in New Zealand in the 12th century. Around the 16th century, some Māori left and settled in the Chatham Islands. That offshoot is known as the Moriori people. The Chatham Islands are not New Zealand. They are small, and cold, and you can’t grow the crops you are used to as […]
The ranking Gold > Silver > Bronze > Iron (> Lead) dates from Hesiod: see Ages of Man. Bronze for toolmaking in common use is older than Iron; Hesiod was aware of that, which is why his Bronze Age is earlier than his Iron Age. Gold and Silver would have outranked Bronze and Iron, because […]
For time depth and sobriety, the first biography I read is still the best: Nixon by Stephen E. Ambrose. The in-depth coverage of his vice-presidency (from an historian who was an Eisenhower fan) explains a lot. Of the others, I wanted to like Fawn M. Brodie‘s Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, but it […]
UML Class Diagrams can express hierarchical ontologies, and associations. Upper Ontologies are intended to model all entities that can be hierarchically related. So if you’re ambitious enough (see: Douglas Lenat), upper ontologies can model life itself with everything in it; and associations can model (at least at first approximation) all relations between with everything within […]