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What are the biggest reasons people choose to drive into towns by car instead of using the train?
This has been an issue of contention between me and my wife. My wife would rather be in a traffic jam for 2 hours, than catch the train. I’ve been an annoyed passenger on such occasions.
None of the other reasons brought up by respondents applies. So long as you are heading to the CBD, Melbourne’s train service is excellent, although it is unpleasantly congested at peak time. It is more affordable than driving and parking. My wife’s work at the time was a fairly direct route, although she would have had to hop off the train and onto a tram.
The main reason, really, was cultural. I caught the train to school in high school, and I have been a train commuter for 30 years. My wife has never had to depend on public transport, and has not felt the need to.
As for incentives, price is a powerful motivator. When petrol prices went up a couple of years ago, train patronage went up 7%. It actually posed a challenge to the train network capacity.
What would be your epic last words?
An adolescent question like this deserves an adolescent poem as its answer. Here’s one I prepared earlier. As an adolescent, in fact.
Taktas jarojn tiuj, kiuj dankas
Dion – trance, kun vagstulta fido.
Trafas kraŝon tiuj, kiuj tranĉas
por si hastan vojon – kun venkrido.
Tanĝas homojn tiuj, kiuj talpas
mensizole, ĉar en si kontentas.
Transas homojn tiuj, kiuj drakas
homestrante, ĉar laŭ si potencas.
Taksas vivon tiuj, kiuj taskas,
je pasumo de jaraĉoj dorme.
Miliardoj vojas kaj fiaskas,
sin-malŝpare, por malvivi morne.
Foja korpo pli ol ni meritas,
ke pluvivu: tiun ni ŝtonumas,
kaj pluvivas mem ĝis preteritas.
Super niaj tomboj, tagoj lumas
sen ni. Tial traktas la drastantoj vivon,
kiel aviadonto aŭtobus-tarifon.
Love that jingle–jangle assonance. Happy to make an exit that way.
Oh, you want a translation? It’d kind of spoil it, because it is adolescent (and I wouldn’t be as unforgiving now), but OK:
Those who thank God measure out
their years in a trance, with vaguely dumb faith.
Those who cut themselves a hasty way
hit a crash, with a victorious laugh.
Those who mole away in mental isolation
are tangential to people, for they are content in themselves.
Those who are dragons commanding men
are beyond people, for they are powerful according to themselves.
Those who have a job to do value life
as a passing of miserable years in sleep.
Billions make their way and fail,
wasting themselves, to be extinguished mourningly.
The occasional body deserves to keep living
more than us. So we stone them,
and keep living ourselves until we are in the past tense.
Above our graves, days shine
without us. That’s why the drastic treat
life, like someone about to board a flight treats the bus ticket.
How would you parody your own writing style on Quora?
I believe that everything that ever needed to be said about this has already been said by my friend Quora Quorason. Vote #1: Quora Quorason’s answer to How would you parody your own writing style on Quora?
This answer is meant to be supplemental to that. Only it isn’t, because I am enamoured of my own recherché grandiloquence.
- I hate Quora and everything about it, and anyone who ever says anything good about it, I shall have no intercourse with ever. For more information, see my blog Malleus Calamorum.
- The Greek for intercourse is συνουσία, “consubstantiality”, where οὐσία “substance” itself derives from the participle of the Ancient Greek copula. (Get it? Copula.) One may draw sundry sociocultural inferences from this. But alack, this is not the forum for such an answer.
- Having perused at least one Wikipedia article, I will now hold forth with great, if borrowed erudition on everything you didn’t need to know about Perso–Moldovan cultural contacts.
I can substantiate all of this by adequately lachrymose personal experience. As the great poet Farrokh Bulsara once put it,
I’m just a poor boy
from a poor family:
Scaramouche, Scaramouche
won’t you play the fandango.
I trust that we can all draw a lesson from this.
As an Australian, what makes you think and feel that you’re different from the British?
Benjamin R. Drakenbourg is right: Australians have a lot invested in thinking they are egalitarian and not-British, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t class in Australia. The sneering at bogans that has happened over the last two decades is nothing if not class. So is the abundance of hipsters in the inner suburbs.
But Australians are in denial about class, and have an egalitarian ideal of the billionaire acting like a labourer, that is pretty entrenched. As someone once told me, the difference between Australians and the British is that lots of Australians are convinced that they are superior—but no Australians accept that they are inferior.
That aside, we exaggerate slight differences with the British, from our insider perspective, which are vanishingly small from an outside viewpoint (such as say Americans). Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are the myths about Australians?
Myth: That Australia is a classless society.
Fact: Only when compared to the British.
Myth: That Australians are an informal, relaxed people.
Fact: Only when compared to the British.
Myth: That Australians are an open, friendly society.
Fact: Only when compared to the British.
Why don’t Apple devices have an emoji of the flag of Ancient Rome?
The intention of the Unicode Regional Indicator Symbols was to represent current countries in existence (as encoded in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2), as locales for software; the flags are a lagniappe. (A rather unfortunate lagniappe.)
Hence, no SPQR flag: the point of the codes is to indicate the country you live in, as a two letter ISO code, to be used for software localisation. (E.g. use Serbian rather than Russian italics for Cyrillic.) The Roman Empire doesn’t have such a code, because you don’t live in it—though a bunch of defunct 20th century states do.
There’s a proposal to throw the door open for Emoji flags to regions such as Scotland and California. Per UTS #51: Unicode Emoji, those are still restricted to present-day national subdivisions, and historical states are not in scope for them.
Which 7 people in history would you like to high-five?
Tough question, Habib le toubib: I don’t do heroes, I like my critical faculties about me, and I’ve been jaded for a while. And of course, anyone I’d choose would be morbidly obscure anyway.
…
OK, challenge accepted.
- Hubert Pernot. The underappreciated giant of Modern Greek historical linguistics. Not a polemicist, not a tub-thumper; he just got on with it, from a safe distance in Paris. His three volume monograph on the dialect of Chios is an accidental history of all of Modern Greek. His neogrammarian probity in his grammar of Tsakonian is a work for the ages.
- Giovanni Gabrieli. Author of the music of the spheres, the Canzone e Sonate. Thanks, man. It’s music that makes you proud to be human.
- Stephanos Sahlikis. If you don’t count Jalal ad-Din Rumi, the first poet to rhyme in Greek, rhyming about whores and gambling and doing time, in the 14th century.
- Woah! His poems just got published in Panagiotiakis’ long-awaited posthumous critical edition, in 2015! Why didn’t I know about this?! I’m going to have to have words to the maintainer of the Early Modern Greek blog. Thanks Habib, for helping me discover that!
- Helen Waddell. I’ve already written about my teen crush on her: Nick Nicholas’ answer to If you could take one historical person from history as a lover/date, who would it be and why? “If I had to pick, I’d pick someone with poetry in their blood, an awkward smile, and gentle donnish erudition. Someone like Helen Waddell.”
- Gough Whitlam. Flawed, self-important, chaotic politician (was this guy even Australian?), who built up my country’s pride and dignity, and made my country worthy of the name. Yes, there’s a reason we won’t see his like again. We still owe him.
- Charilaos Trikoupis. Taciturn, reserved, orderly politician (was this guy even Greek?), who presided over reforms and infrastructure and a bankruptcy, and made my country worthy of the name. Yes, there’s a reason we won’t see his like again. We still owe him.
- Theodore Metochites. For writing the most obscurantist overgilded Greek ever in his pseudo-Homeric poems, which posed the greatest challenge I faced in all my time at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. For decreeing that the Ancients left us Mediaeval Greeks nothing to say—in a foreword to 120 essays. For commissioning the marvels of Chora Church, while he was the moneybags-in-charge of the Empire. And for retreating into his own church with dignity, with his books and his sorrow, after he lost everything.
What are some tips for living in Melbourne?
- The sooner you pronounce the city name the way the locals do, the better. Not MELbin, but MALbin: Salary–celery Merger, a proudly Victorian peculiarity. (Whaddaya mean, New Zuhluhnduhrs do it too?) And never, ever pronounce that <r> in Melbourne. What do you think this is, Melbourne, Florida?
- Never say anything good about Sydney. It’s against the law.
- As others have said, learn to coffee snob. See for example Guide to America | Chaser Guides. The print version has the gem “Every day, Starbucks sells 4 million cups of coffee. And not one of them is any good.”
- Go for weekend drives, down the Mornington Peninsula, up to the hills (towards Mt Dandenong), or down to North Hipsterville Daylesford. Thank me later.
- Maybe get me a latte or something. Strong, no sugar.
- There are divides in Melbourne:
- There is a North Of The River/South Of The River divide. It’s not social, it’s about travel convenience. It’s easy to be in a rut and never venture across the River. Don’t fall for it unless you haven’t bothered to get a car. There’s good things to be experienced both sides of the river.
- I once gave an American linguist a tour of the inner south. It was all new to him: all the Melbourne Uni academics who had hosted him had never taken him further south than St Kilda. ST KILDA!
- There is a West Of The River/East Of The River divide. That one is social, and it’s to do with lack of infrastructure in the West. Which means the West has been historically working-class and aggrieved. Demographic pressure though means that gentrification is happening even in the West; Williamstown is already shmick, and Footscray is now only selectively grotty. (Why yes, I do live East Of The River, why do you ask?)
- There is a Hipster/Burbs divide. That one is real. Do not succumb to it on either side. The inner city is wonderful and vibrant. It’s also smug. And the middle range burbs are no longer a wasteland; there’s nice greenery and good social enclaves and a booming café culture. (The outer burbs… well, yeah. They’re dormitory suburbs. Particularly estates. Berwick’s nice though.)
What are some examples of folk etymology?
Bridegrooms, Bonfires, and Woodchucks: Folk Etymologies in English. From that link:
- The textbook examples for English are sparrowgrass for asparagus, and bridegroom, which should have been bridegoom. (The word gome for “man” became extinct, so people grabbed the nearest similar word. Now that the noun groom for “horse attendant” has also become extinct, people use groom to mean bridegroom.)
- Apparently cockroach is a folk etymology mangling of cucaracha, and Algonquin otchek became woodchuck.
- A bonfire was originally bonefire; people assumed the bon- is French.
- The change of femelle to female in English was a folk etymology linking it to male.
An example I discovered just this year, because of Quora, is the Greek for toyboy or twink, teknó. It looks like a mis-stressed version of the Ancient Greek téknon “child”, the word with which priests address their parishioners. (Insert your own joke here.)
In fact, it’s from the Romany tiknó, “small (child)”. Kaliarda, the cant of Greek street queens in the 60s, used Romany for its base vocabulary, just as its counterpart Polari for English used Italian. Someone along the line noticed the similarity of tiknó to téknon, and switched the vowel accordingly. (Amusingly, someone also noticed it in 1800: Etymologicon magnum, or Universal etymological dictionary, on a new plan [By W. Whiter].)
… Unless Romany tiknó is derived from téknon itself, of course. But I’m reasonably sure it isn’t: Scandoromani derives it from Sanskrit tīkṣṇa “sharp”.
What is your favourite celebrity nickname?
Some celebrity nicknames are funny, and ingenious, and a sign that you have made it big, if you have an instantly recognizable nickname.
On the other hand, some celebrity nicknames show familiar contempt for celebrities, and I like those too. Australian bent in these.
- Madge for Madonna
- This. So delightfully pulling her down a peg.
- Jacko or Wacko Jacko for Michael Jackson
- The Silver Budgie for Bob Hawke
- Silver-haired, short
- The Singing Budgie for Kylie Minogue
- Sings, short
- The Mad Monk for Tony Abbott
- Former seminarian, volatile, social conservative
- Dipper for Robert DiPierdomenico
- Farnsey and Barnsey for John Farnham and Jimmy Barnes
- The rhyme was used as a commentary on the uniformity of Australian rock radio being monopolised by them
What should be included in the Constitution of Sockistan?
Habib, so many good answers here with allusion to the US Constitution, and I couldn’t hope to exceed them or even reach them.
And then, I remembered a different country’s constitution. Not even its current version.
In the 60s, Greek leftist youth protested the assassination of Grigoris Lambrakis and the subsequent upheaval in the country, by chanting “114!”
Article 114, the final article of the 1952 Constitution of Greece. It’s article 120 in the 2008 revision of the current Constitution of Greece.
H τήρηση του Συντάγματος επαφίεται στον πατριωτισμό των Eλλήνων, που δικαιούνται και υποχρεούνται να αντιστέκονται με κάθε μέσο εναντίον οποιουδήποτε επιχειρεί να το καταλύσει με τη βία.
Upholding the Constitution is a responsibility entrusted to the patriotism of the Greek people, who are entitled and obligated to resist by any means necessary whoever attempts to do away with it by force.
Mutatis mutandis, Habib le toubib? You could do worse than this as a closer.