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What do you look like with and without eyeglasses?
I don’t wear glasses much any more; just for driving or concerts, really, and I don’t do much of either. In fact, I had to go back one and a half years to find any photos of me with glasses at all.
So,
How is your experience of reading a text in a language other than English different from reading the same text in English?
Reading English is just flowing water to me. The information just snarfs up.
Reading Modern Greek, I’m hyper-aware of stylistic differences; every concession to Ancient Greek or opening up to dialect was a political act up until the 70s, and I learned my Greek in the aftermath of that. Journalistic rigid syntax dismays me; I can rejoice with good choice of words, to the point of forgetting what the prose is talking about. That can happen in English, but the threshold is far higher.
Reading Ancient Greek, which I’m really not comfortable with, is assembling a puzzle. With a sledgehammer. I know what the bits mean, although there’s a fair bit of running to the dictionary; I find it very hard to put the bits together.
Reading French, and reading German, is glimpsing a coastline through a fog. My understanding is foggy, but good enough that I can skim—especially if it’s scholarly writing, where the vocabulary is more familiar.
Reading Esperanto is surprisingly smooth; there’s less texture and shoals to get in the way. My eyebrow still arches if I see a stylistic choice I don’t like.
Answered 2017-04-24 · Upvoted by
, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy.
What’s the difference between Res extensa and Res corporea?
Not a philosopher by any stretch, but if I can decipher my Googlings of Heidegger’s interpretations of Descartes correctly:
The res corporea “the bodily substance” is defined in opposition to the res cogitans “the thinking substance”. Applied to people, it is the human body as opposed to the mind. The defining attribute of the res corporea is its extensio: the fact that it has physical dimensions, and thus, physical existence—something it shares with all physically existing things, but not with the mind, the soul, or God.
So the res corporea “human bodies” are a subset of all res extensa “things that have physical dimensions”. Descartes uses res corporea and res extensa interchangeably, since he is defining mind vs body. Heidegger uses res extensa separately from res corporea, as he’s defining not just mind vs body, but the physical world (which consists of more than just human bodies).
Do you think it is reasonable and useful to social justice for a white cis man to refrain from expressing his perspectives too often or too forcibly?
This is contentious, and ideological.
I’ll just give my answer, as a middle-aged white cis het male.
I have judgement. I have opinions. I am not disenfranchised from having opinions or judgement, simply by accident of what privilege I have inherited. I am entitled to discuss those opinions, and so long as I do so openly and receptively and respectfully, that is a good thing.
That said: I am privileged, which means that I have a hegemonic* perspective. The kinds of perspectives that I naturally align to get heard a lot, and are familiar to me and to my interlocutors. The kinds of perspectives that my less privileged interlocutors may have are not necessarily as familiar to me.
Which means that while my judgement and opinion is as valid as any other’s, I readily concede that I have more to learn from the less-privileged than they from me, about the realities they confront. And being open to learning means that, a lot of the time, I withhold judgement, and I don’t interrupt, and I just listen. And because my privilege is the kind of privilege that drowns out others’ voices, I don’t pipe up with my opinion and judgement until it’s appropriate to: it’s not all about me.
Is the reflex cry of mansplaining and whitesplaining good citizenship and good alliance-building? No, because reflex cries are not discourse, they are turf-guarding. But if the less-privileged have carved out a space to speak to their lack of privilege, then the more-privileged are in that space as guests; and it is courteous to act like it. Offer your opinion, but offer it courteously, and with a bit of deference.
If they keep shouting you down, and you are honestly speaking in good faith with them—why then, there’s no discussion to be had; shake the dust off your shoes, and move on. But do make sure you’ve been listening, and trying to learn.
*If Sam Morningstar’s Tourette’s syndrome involves saying “neo-Marxism”, mine is saying “hegemony”.
Australian Republic Movement Ad
How do you remind Australians on Australia Day that they should really be a republic after all?
By getting them to sing the Australian Royal National Anthem in an ad.
You know the one.
‘God save the Queen’: Royal anthem gets republican twist in new ad campaign
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2RQ_M55Jhaw
Good work, Australian Republican Movement. You didn’t even need the people in the ad to stumble over the words (“something and glorious”). The incongruity is already plenty obvious.
(You might want to update your HTML title on your website, though, to reflect your rebranding to “Australian Republic Movement”…)
The YouTube comments, btw, indicate that the ad did not have the same resonance with monarchists that it has had with me…
Why are the Black people in America called African-Americans but we don’t have French-Americans or any other nationality Americans?
Am astonished that the obvious answer hasn’t been uttered yet.
There was a longstanding practice in America of referring to white ethnic minorities as hyphenated Americans. (Something Teddy Roosevelt famously decried.) There were, and are, French–Americans, Italian–Americans, German–Americans, etc etc.
Blacks changed their description from racial terms to a hyphenated American term in the 1980s, to emphasise that their deviation as a minority from any American norm should not be treated any different from that of French–Americans: that they too were just another ethnic minority within America—but still an integral part of the national fabric. That they were an ethnic minority, not a “different race”, with all the exoticisation and 3/5 of a person baggage that entailed.
Black people in America are called African–American in order to assert that they are no different from French–Americans. The discrepancy in prevalence with the white hyphenated terms is one of timing: by the 1980s, those white ethnicities had largely assimilated, so their hyphenated terms weren’t as widely heard as they were in Teddy Roosevelt’s time. And the steep rise in the 1980s is unsurprising: it was a deliberate coinage at a particular time.
In the 1980s, the term African American was advanced on the model of, for example, German-American or Irish-American to give descendants of American slaves and other American blacks who lived through the slavery era a heritage and a cultural base. The term was popularized in black communities around the country via word of mouth and ultimately received mainstream use after Jesse Jackson publicly used the term in front of a national audience in 1988. Subsequently, major media outlets adopted its use.
[…]
Many African Americans have expressed a preference for the term African American because it was formed in the same way as the terms for the many other ethnic groups currently living in the nation. Some argued further that, because of the historical circumstances surrounding the capture, enslavement and systematic attempts to de-Africanize blacks in the United States under chattel slavery, most African Americans are unable to trace their ancestry to a specific African nation; hence, the entire continent serves as a geographic marker.
Should some of Mahler’s early symphonies be considered more collections of movements than unified statements?
does anyone regularly listen to the Third all the way through?
*raises hand*
In fact, the Third is so through-composed, that its original final movement, which ended up as the first movement of his Fourth, quotes the fifth movement of the Third. And the Third has a quite intentional, programmatic structure of building up from the unconscious (nature) to the fully conscious (God).
Ditto the Second, again with a clear programmatic structure (notwithstanding the exceedingly awkward request for a five minute break between the first and second movements). The Fourth has the famous flash-forward of the fourth movement in the third, though you could argue that the first three movements are more loosely coupled; but of course the Fourth is deliberately less expansive than the other symphonies. And the Middle symphonies are awash in recapitulating material from earlier movements.
I think the only symphony you could argue that for is the First Symphony. There’s meant to be a programme holding that symphony together too, and Mahler did not disavow that programme as thoroughly as he did for the later symphonies; but the movements really do sound like they have nothing to do with each other. But the First is an immature work structurally anyway.
The criticism is a legitimate one to raise with symphonic works in general, and until Mahler’s generation, having thematic cohesion between movements was rare. (Beethoven rummages through the other movements’ themes in the start of the fourth movement of the Ninth, but that’s because he’s programmatically searching for a tune.) The pursuit of thematic cohesion within a symphony is plausibly an inheritance from Wagner; and in that regard, Mahler was a Wagnerian.
Why can’t European Australians speak another language other than English but the Asian and Aboriginal Australians can?
My experience to Duke Skibbington’s is so utterly different, I’m all… “are you sure you’re Greek?” But of course, he’s 3rd generation, and I’m 1.5th generation. (2nd generation, but spent childhood in Greece.)
It is of course to do with assimilation, which is to do with the timespan your family has been in Australia, and with intermarriage out of the ethnic group.
- Aboriginal Australians who were part of the Stolen Generations underwent forced assimilation; they don’t know any of their indigenous language, to their distress. Aboriginal Australians still living a traditional lifestyle in the country’s north are likelier to have held on to their language.
- There have been Asians in Australia since the Gold Rush; those Asian Australians are unlikely to have retained their language across 6 generations. The Asian Australians I went to high school with and am still in contact with are 2nd generation; they don’t look like passing their language on.
- Second generation Greeks were known in the 90s to be outliers in how much stronger their retention of Greek was than for other ethnic groups (even though their Greek, as I experienced, was not so much conversational as a secrecy language). But now that we’re in the 3rd generation, their Greek is gone, as Duke reports (and I know other such Greek-Australians).
To the extent that the major wave of Asian migration into Australia was in the 70s–90s, and the major wave of (non-British) European migration into Australia was in the 50s–70s, European–Australians are on aggregate one generation ahead in assimilation. That’s the most one can say.
In England, we have a curious habit of cheering when someone (especially staff) drops a load of glasses or plates. Is this the norm in other countries?
In Australia, in pubs, we yell “Taxi!”
The premise is that the glass or plate was dropped by someone drunk, who therefore will be needing a taxi, as they are in no state to drive themselves home.
Do dogs understand the concept of dance?
I will not be confused with an ethologist. But I do know that whenever I try to dance with my honey, and our dog is anywhere near, Jenny gets excited, wags her tail, and jumps on us to join in.
Fricking dog.
My understanding with what little I know of ethology is, Jenny does so because she understands dancing as equivalent to dogs’ play-fighting. That, she understands; that’s why she wants to join in. So I’d assume that’s the shortcircuit in her brain, rather than understanding dance on its own terms.
Dogs are also hypersensitive to changes in people’s gait. Jenny gets very agitated when she sees me on a swing; but that’s something I gathered from reading, rather than from Jenny. I think the freakout of dogs seeing the changed gait of dancers would overrule any recognition of controlled gait as communication.