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Category: Personal
Nicholas as Žižek and as Generic Edgelord
I’m happier than I look! But it is toasty, 4 pm… Slavoj Žižek: DJ François Kevorkian (that comparison, I got volunteered in Zante): OK, back to me: I’m getting mistaken as a foreigner a lot more than elsewhere, including in Rhodes. Even changing planes in Istanbul, airport staff assumed I was local and not foreign. […]
Σταύρος Νικολάου (1936–2023)
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 […]
Two songs of loss
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 […]
Brag about yourself. What are you really good at doing?
“Let us now praise famous Nicks.” I hope I’m good at popularising obscure topics in the set union of Greek and linguistics. It’s what I’m ostensibly supposed to be doing here, instead of complaining about the site’s misdeeds. When I’m firing on all cylinders, my intellectual labour is quick. Fearsomely quick. I’m quick to pick […]
What are some sentences that make perfect sense to you but sound like gibberish to most people?
Opening up my Master’s thesis randomly, this para makes all the sense in the world to me, and I’m sure it makes somewhat less sense to most. Unlike volitionality or temporality, these principles underlying these relations cannot be captured by a referential, truth-conditional semantics. The relationships described by these relations are not real-world relations; they […]
What were you doing on September 11th, 2001?
I was living in Orange County, and I’d already decided to quit my job; I was leaving to come back to Australia in two months. It was a hermetic, unpleasant work environment, and I was already not on speaking terms with my colleagues—over some inconceivably unreal pique. I tended to sleep in; I still do. […]
What’s the hamartia (fatal flaw) in your story?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamartia A good question, and I hope to hear more stories from others. Hamartia is about viewing your life as an Aristotelean tragedy. So, The Decalogue of Nick #2: I’ve trained as a linguist, and I have done computational linguistics stuff by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile Scratch me just a little bit, and […]
What motivates you to write?
A2A by Abigail (Abbey) Beach. See, Liana? I’m not ignoring your A2As; it just takes me a while to get through them. By the time I met PROF Anne FREADMAN, I was the departmental IT guy, setting up Macs, and misquoting Peirce to her, a Peirce specialist. She certainly did not owe me any academic […]
How old are you and what bodily pain do you have right now?
I’m turning 46. Vague back pain, which I can mostly ignore. Occasional headaches and lightheadedness, apparently associated with adjusting to new medication, which I am finding it harder to ignore. And of course, the heartache of a middle-aged man’s disappointments. Answered 2017-07-18 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/How-old-are-you-and-what-bodily-pain-do-you-have-right-now/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
As a teacher, what is the weirdest thing you have seen in your school or classroom?
Back when I was lecturing, I made a consistent effort to be the weirdest thing in the room. If I was running late, I would boom the opening words of my lecture while walking down the corridor into the theatre. I would walk into lecture drinking a Slurpee, and remind students that no eating or […]