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Julia Gillard has become much hated (perhaps unfairly) in Australia. Has she discredited the idea of a female Prime Minister of Australia?
Tough question.
Gillard herself, in her farewell speech, displayed a salutary self-awareness when she said:
I do want to say the reaction to being the first female prime minister does not explain everything about my time in the prime ministership, nor does it explain nothing about my prime ministership.
There was sexist venom around Gillard’s prime ministership; the instances are known and uncontroversial.
But there was also a true disappointment in Gillard. In how her predecessor, a charismatic leader, was deposed without anyone explaining why. In how an engaged, activist education minister was transformed into a rigid, robotic prime minister. In how an atheist in a de facto relationship resisted marriage equality, rather than showing any leadership. In how her Misogyny Speech energised everyone in the world but politically engaged Australians, who knew the context was the whole sordid mess of the speakership of Peter Slipper.
Has it ruined the prime ministership for women? I don’t think so; it’s been two PMs since in the merry-go-round of Australian Federal politics, it’s already “Julia Who?” But then, I didn’t anticipate the outburst of sexism that hounded Gillard to begin with.
Could Julie Bishop do it? Probably not, loyal deputy too often, although she is one of the few members of the Abbott cabinet that commanded any respect at large. Could Penny Wong or Tanya Plibersek? Maybe. We were in a strange regressive place under Abbott, but a lot of people do want to move on. Which is why Turnbull was greeted as a saviour by everyone but the conservative true believers. (Remember that?)
Why do we romanticise last words?
Once more, I’m going to cite the renowned Greek humorist Nikos Tsiforos. It worked for me quite well with Nick Nicholas’ answer to What do Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland think of each other?
Ελληνική Μυθολογία του Νίκου Τσιφόρου (Μέρος 1)
Once upon a time, there was a guy called Goethe. A German and a sage. But so what if you are a German and a sage? If your time’s up, you’re going to die. So in the year 1832, Johann Wolfgang Goethe decided it was time for him to kick the bucket, and fell into his bed. And when he was about to die, he cried out:
—Light. More light.
That’s what the man said, and he made a most dignified exit into nothingness. But people are cattle and clueless, so they took these words and made them into an omen.
—Just look what the sage said!
—What’d he say?
—More light should flood into humanity. Into our spirit. That we might see the truth clearly.
—He said that, did he!
—Ja!
—Wow.
And noone considered that the poor guy was dying, and he wanted more light, because his eyes were glazing over with death. The lamp grew dark, and at a time like that it didn’t occur to him to utter philosophies and preach nonsense: he found himself, like any human, in an hour of weakness, and spoke it. If a common person had said that, that’s how they’d interpret it. The natural way. But Goethe was a sage. And if one sage says something stupid, all the other sages will work overtime to grant it a deeper meaning; otherwise they won’t be considered sages any more.
Would you take a DNA test to see your origins?
Some fascinating answers here.
For me, no, and that’s about different attitudes to ethnicity and history.
My no is for the same reason as User’s (answer stupidly collapsed by mods) or Feifei Wang’s. My skepticism about the methodologies in pop DNA tests is the same as Madelene Zarifa’s, my skepticism about the utility the same as Lyonel Perabo’s.
My father’s Greek Cypriot, my mother’s Greek Cretan. It’s likely Greek peasantry all the way back. If there was some stray Venetian in my lineage from 500 years back, or some stray Arabic from 1000 years back, that does not impact my sense of who I am—a sense that is cultural and not genetic.
Now, that attitude is coloured by being brought up in an ethnically monolithic area (Crete, where even the Muslims were Greek). If I were Anglo in the Melting Pot of the US, I may well have a different attitude. In fact, Cypriots have been much more sanguine about being a mixture of people than Greece Greeks are; I might have been more curious had I been brought up in Cyprus.
But really, the peregrinations of my ancestors, such as they might have been, doesn’t tell me who I am. I already know who I am. And “0.5% Sub-Saharan African” or “1.2% East Asian” is statistical noise, it’s not identity.
Feifei put it well:
If the test shown I have Arabic or perhaps Jewish ancestors, I’m not going to start picking up the Quran or convert to Judaism. I don’t understand some people’s need to search their “roots”, as if that would help them define who they are. I might not know exactly who I am, but I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with my genetics. I originated in Beijing, China. That’s my origin.
What are the greatest expressions, phrasal verbs or quotes from other languages you know (not your mother tongue)?
The best saying of Ancient Greek ever comes from the very end of Ancient Greek.
When Julian (emperor), last Roman advocate of paganism, was asked what he thought of Christianity, he said:
ἀνέγνων. ἔγνων. κατέγνων.
It’s a truly magnificent pun.
Literally, it means: I up-knew, I knew, I down-knew.
“To up-know” is the Greek for “to read”. “To down-know” is the Greek for “to condemn”. “To know” can be used to mean “to understand”.
So: I up-knew, I knew, I down-knew = I have read it. I have understood it. I have condemned it.
Or, as a most weak echo of Julian’s magnificence:
I’ve read it; I get it; I’ll shred it.
When Esperanto was invented by Ludovik Zamenhof, the lack of a culture was somewhat felt, though nowhere near as acutely felt as people assume. In any case, it was quickly filled in with a whole lot of Mitteleuropa literary culture, which was what was prestigious around where Esperanto was invented.
As a sign of respect, Ludovik Zamenhof published his father’s collection of proverbs in multiple languages. Including Esperanto. And the Esperanto has jingle jangle blunt rhymes, the way you’d expect of proverbial wisdom.
Those proverbs were instant culture; but they weren’t high culture. So sadly, they were ignored by everyone in Esperanto culture since. With the exception of the magnificent translation into Esperanto of the first volume of Asterix, which used them with gusto. (Even more sadly: the subsequent volumes were done by other people, and were nowhere near as clever.)
One of them wedged itself into my mind when I found the collection, and it hasn’t dislodged itself since. You could say, it’s a relation of Julian’s apophthegm.
Dio longe paciencas, sed severe rekompencas.
God has long patience. And stern payback.
Does Knowledge require denotation?
An interesting question, Anon. Denotation means many related things, in different disciplines, and in all of them, I believe the answer is no. Denotation is a not a sufficient prerequisite for knowledge.
Going through Denotation:
- In linguistics and semiotics, knowing the denotation/sense of a word is knowing only a narrow subset of its meaning: you also need to know its connotative, emotional meaning to know how the word works in context. Knowing that assertive and bossy refer to the same kind of attitude doesn’t mean you know how to use them appropriately.
- In logic, we can go further: the denotation as the extension/sense of a word, the set of all things to which a word applies, is an unworkably narrow kind of meaning. To use the hackneyed example, the Morning Star and the Evening Star have two different senses, even if they both refer to {Venus}. The Present King of France and the President of Australia have different senses, even if their denotation is the null set in both cases.
- In fact, inasmuch as the Present King of France and the President of Australia don’t have a denotation (a set of things they refer to in the world), denotation isn’t even a necessary component of meaning—and therefore of knowledge as the destination of meaning. You can know about things that don’t exist—and which therefore have no denotation.
What makes diaspora groups such as the Armenians, Jews, etc. so successful? Did the diaspora itself have some marked impact on the culture and trajectories of these groups or is it something else entirely?
A socially marginalised group will not have access to the normal institutional advantages of members of the host society—connections, class privilege, leisure time, cultural familiarity etc. etc. Members of that group will be more highly driven to succeed, to redress those disadvantages.
They will be more strongly motivated to succeed, if they see exemplars of success around them—if some members of the diaspora have already succeeded despite social marginalisation, or if they are intermixed with the host society (not ghettoised), so that they are exposed to paradigms of success from within the host society.
If OTOH they’re ghettoised, and if the diaspora society is insular, so that they are not exposed to paradigms of success—then, not so much. There is less incentive to succeed, if the only experience you have is of failure.
And if the diaspora knows what success looks like, they will use whatever levers the host society does not expressly or implicitly block them from using. Such as public education.
That, btw, is why I did not know any Greeks in Australia doing linguistics when I went to uni. That’s a luxury of established ethnicities. I only started seeing Greeks in linguistics classes when I was lecturing.
What made up Greek term could be used for this pretend medical speciality; “The study and exploration of careers for doctors.”?
I’m going to continue with James Cottam’s coinage, done in comments to James Cottam’s answer to Does this made up Latin/Greek word, Vitaemedology, make sense for the following phrase “The study of careers for doctors.”
iatrurgology ἰατρουργολογία. Doctor work-ology.
But let’s see what others have to say…
Why do English-speaking people often have strange first names?
The respondents so far have not given a satisfactory answer. How’s it feel when your culture is exoticised, eh?
I share Anon’s attitude towards Anglo nomenclature. Let’s try to unpack it.
Traditional societies have traditional approaches to naming people. If you’re a Roman, there’s only a dozen praenomina, some clan names, and a nickname cognomen that ends up being a surname itself. If you’re Ancient Greek or a Germanic tribesperson, there’s a fixed pattern of compounds. If you’re a Christian in Europe up until a century ago, there’s a fixed repertoire of saint names.
That’s not primarily about religion and books of fairy tales. That’s about having roots and a community and a cultural context.
One respondent found that horrifying. You know what I find horrifying? Running out and getting a random name for your kid just because. Saddling someone with Dweezil or Thursday. Dweezil dealt with it, sure (EDIT: he insisted on making it official when he was 5); but Dweezil was born in the Anglosphere.
(EDIT: And he was 5.)
And here’s the thing. The outlier isn’t OP, with his distaste of creative nomenclature. The outlier is the Anglosphere. Coming up with names with unfettered creativity, without any attention to community norms, is not the normal course of affairs.
And it wasn’t the normal course of affairs in the Anglosphere either, until the 20th century. There are fads and perturbations from the ’20s on, but the massive shakeup in most popular names in the US seems to date from the 1970s: Top 10 Baby Names by Decade
What changed around then? More and more individualism. Less sway of traditional structures, including religion and extended families. Hippie stuff. Social mobility. After that, it just snowballs in those particular communities: if noone calls their kid John or Mary any more, you don’t either. (In fact, Mary’s now are a retro thing.)
But that’s started as an Anglosphere thing. It’s been much slower to happen in Europe, and in fact parents wanting to emulate Anglosphere name creativity often bump into legal barriers.
The legal barriers aren’t to kill your buzz, man. They’re codifications of what was long presumed to be the normal way of doing things.
… And yes, were I to have kids, this would be a major issue of contention in our household…
Why are Australians hostile towards anything American?
Fear.
An entirely intelligible response to a hegemonic culture with substantial overlap with your own: fear that your culture will be assimilated into the hegemon, that the country will become unrecognisable to you, that the virtues you are familiar with and have come to cherish will be eroded. That you will cease being you, and start being the Other.
In the panoply of worldwide reactions to hegemony, this one’s rather on the benign side. It’s not Trumpism. It’s not Sinophobia. It’s mostly jocular. And I’m sure it’s exactly what happens in Canada too—except that Canadians are much more polite about it than Aussies are.
(Except possibly for the Québécois, câlisse!)
You might wonder why Australians weren’t as overtly hostile about their former hegemon Britain. But there were flareups, even back in the unenlightened days before Gough Whitlam. The Bodyline tactics in cricket in 1932, leading to Australians boycotting UK products. The strain of Australian nationalism of the 1880s and 1890s, hosted by The Bulletin. The class and sectarian war behind the idolisation of Bushrangers.
Oh, and Why don’t Australians celebrate Halloween? BECAUSE IT’S A SEPPO HOLIDAY!!!
(Psst.
Psst!
C’m ’ere.
Yeah, you.
Some of my best friends are Seppos. But don’t tell anyone, OK?)
What is the first image when you Google your name?
Nick Nicholas. You wouldn’t think it’d be that popular a name, right? And yet, I’m the SIXTH Nick Nicholas here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are you the first to have registered with your name or did a homonym or namealike register before you?
The Nick Nicholas’s that do show up change; there was a jazz musician, there was an anti-spam programmer, there was the CEO of Time, there was a magician, there was a car salesman…
… these days:
- A gynecologist in Middlesex
- A golf writer in Florida
- Me (LinkedIn)
- Me (Academia.edu)
- Me (my homepage)
- The car salesman, in Florida. (So that’s what he looks like…)
The next hit is “Nick (Nicholas) Ilyadis”. “Nick (Nicholas) X” comes up a lot when I ego-surf.