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Did Henry Kissinger ever usurp the function of Richard Nixon, taking executive decision without assent?
I can’t recall an instance where Kissinger did, though there were plenty of instances where he undermined Nixon or disobeyed instructions. I am reading Dallek’s Nixon and Kissinger right now though, and will update if I find an instance.
Haldeman came closer by routinely failing to pass on Nixon’s enraged instructions to fire everybody. In his sober moments, Nixon was grateful to him for that.
The closest Nixon came to being usurped was just before his resignation. Def Sec Schlesinger and I think Haig agreed they’d block any attempt by Nixon to launch thermonuclear warfare.
EDIT: Now that I have got up to the relevant chapter of Nixon and Kissinger (p. 530). The Yom Kippur War coincided with the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon was in no state to deal with the war, and left the handling it to Kissinger. I was prepared to think of much of it as delegation, though it was increasingly hard to: anything Nixon said during the war, Kissinger considered counterproductive.
On the night of the 24th of October, the US needed to head off Soviet threats to intervene unilaterally in the Middle East. The Washington Special Action Group, a committee for serious crisis management within the National Security Council, met, and raised the military alert to Defcon III. It worked: the Soviets, caught by surprise, stood down, and the war was over in a couple of days.
As Wikipedia mentions, citing one historian’s account:
When Kissinger asked Haig whether [Nixon] should be wakened, the White House chief of staff replied firmly ‘No.’ Haig clearly shared Kissinger’s feelings that Nixon was in no shape to make weighty decisions
Dallek’s account sounds like something Toby Ziegler would say in the West Wing, when a fairly similar scenario played out:
It was an amazing turn of events: None of the seven officials who met for over three hours until 2 A.M. had ever been elected to anything by voters. Yet they were setting policy in a dangerous international crisis. Kissinger rationalized Nixon’s absence by saying that he had never attended WSAG meetings. However, the WSAG had never confronted a crisis of this gravity before. More important, the group made decisions that should only come from the president, though Kissinger and Haig were confident that they reflected the President’s views. Others at the meeting were not so sure.
How come there is only one written musical language for western music, when there are so many different spoken languages?
OP, your question appears to be about musical notation (written language), not about the language of music per se.
Western musical notation developed out of Mensural notation , which in turn developed out of Neumatic notation.
The Byzantine Notation system is an independent development of neumatic notation, used in the Greek church, which looks nothing like Western notation. The Znamenny chant notation is the Russian derivative of Byzantine Notation. Hold that thought.
The comparison to make is not between musical written notation and different spoken languages. The comparison to make is between written notation of music and written notation of language.
The written notation of language is a script. In Europe, there’s Roman script, Greek script, and Cyrillic script.
There are many different spoken languages in Western Europe, but all use the same Roman script. They all use the same Roman script, because they all got literacy through the Catholic church, which used Latin.
The countries of Orthodox Eastern Europe did not use Roman script. They used Cyrillic (which was based on Greek), because they all got literacy through the Orthodox church.
There was an Ancient Greek musical notation, but it did not survive. Music notation in mediaeval Europe started in the church. And there was a Catholic tradition of notation (neumes, then mensural), and an Orthodox tradition of notation (Byzantine and znamenny).
Since all Catholic countries shared the same musical notation, it was straightforward for them to keep sharing the same musical notation, when it developed into something recognisably modern in the 1600s (even if by then music was also secular, and they weren’t all Catholic).
So there is only one written musical language for western music, for the exact same reason there is only one script for Western European languages.
I want to start a polyamorous/polygamous lifestyle. What are the most important things I need to know/be warned about?
As a monogamous individual (hello, wife!) I’m not well placed to answer; but I’ll add a tidbit of my own limited experience, to corroborate what Claire J. Vannette said at the end of her answer.
In my early twenties, I hanged out with a group of poly folk. I was in a brief relationship with one (let’s call them X), and found that it wasn’t for me. Not why X and I broke up, but it didn’t help. And I’ll save the TMI on that for when I’m more drunk, and I have a less broad audience.
Anyway, the thing about this poly group was that a critical mass of them (particularly group member A who got together with X) spent a lot of time talking about how being poly made them more highly evolved human beings than the unenlightened masses.
Well, you could argue that. In hindsight, given that everyone involved was in their early twenties, I would be reluctant to infer much of anything. It’s the kind of thing obnoxious twenty year olds would say.
Somewhat ruefully, about a decade later, I went to X’s housewarming party. And because I hadn’t stayed in touch, I asked what had become of Y, and Z, and W.
It turned out that half the group weren’t on speaking terms any more, and the other half were grudgefucking.
Now, I may well have gotten my immature vengeful monogamist jollies out of that situation; but that’s not the lesson you should be drawing from my anecdote, Anon.
The lesson you should be drawing is to go back to Claire’s answer, and Noël’s.
- Being poly is work: it’s not just a full-time orgy.
- Being poly depends on open and clear communication.
- Being poly doesn’t make you a superior being, any more than it makes you an inferior being.
- And I know twenty-year-olds are sexy, but God, don’t get drawn into stoner debates with them about superiority. You’ll end up like an Ayn Rand acolyte.
- Being poly means you still have to deal with insecurities, defensiveness, and all the other stuff that flesh is heir to. And you have a higher responsibility to deal with them, if anything, because more people are being impacted.
Oh, and one more thing. One of the arguments A would use for being poly is that “love is not a cake”: it’s not a finite resource, you can share love with multiple people.
Which is true. But you know what is a cake?
Time.
You will be sharing time with multiple people, and you will need to be there for them when they need you with them, as a partner. (And even as a fuckbuddy.)
As the numbers go up, so do the logistics. (Another thing I was amused to see A work out a bit too late.) Be prepared to have open discussion about that too.
How would you describe the dialect and accent of the languages which you can speak?
Ooh! Ooh! All the good people are here!
(And if not, they will be, dammit.)
The languages I speak or have spoken with some degree of spontaneity:
English, Greek, French, German, Italian, Latin, Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon
*deep breath*
English
Australian English, probably General vanilla. Nothing particularly “ethnic” about my accent (the “woggy” accent of my youth, which had strongly centralised vowels). Some Americanisms in my vocabulary, but no more I suspect than most of my contemporaries; I don’t think my infancy addiction to Sesame Street, or my three years living in Orange County had an impact. Americanisms do come out when I talk to Americans though.
A tiny bit of interference from Greek: “shut the phone”, “shut the lights”, and the propensity to spout proverbial Greek folk wisdom at inappropriate moments. (“Silk boxers require adroit arses.”)
(It sounds better in the original.)
Greek
My accent has been impacted from living most of my life outside of Greece: my dentals move to alveolars, and when I’m tired I no longer trill my r’s. I don’t have great command of slang, and I find it challenging to tell a story in Greek entertainingly (i.e. fluency in narrative strategies).
My vocabulary is eclectic in the opposite direction from Dimitra Triantafyllidou, as she has noted—it’s on the hyperdemoticist side. I delight in obsolete loanwords (guverno for government < Italian (Venetian?) governo; lakirdi for conversation < Turkish lâkırdı); and I’m probably the only Greek speaker left who prefers englezos over anglos for English. Paradoxically, that actually shows you how bookish my Greek is—the demotic comes from literature.
My pronunciation, I’m convinced, is influenced by my father’s Cypriot: my nasals are a bit overlong. But my father does not speak dialect (apart from the odd explosion of θκιάολε μαύρε!), and any dialect influence I have is from my mother’s Cretan. I can fake Cretan dialect just convincingly enough that my relatives get concerned (“you, a scholar, talking like a peasant!”); but actual substrate influence is limited. Maybe a bit of intonation, occasional Rj > R (I thought δεκαρά was slang for δεκαριά “ten-odd”; it’s dialect. The lexicographer who picked me up on it thought this adorable.)
French
A little bit of Southern French from my high school French teacher—pronouncing final e’s. But mostly, I’m afraid, Pepe le Pew. My vowels are more often than not wrong, in the way that ’Allo ’Allo alludes to.
German
Like most of my foreign languages (other than Klingon and French), my German sounds Greek. I can try and remember to speak crisply and teutonically, or I can try and remember my vocabulary and putting the verb at the end; I can’t do both.
When I was attempting a particularly convoluted sentence one day, my German interlocutor interrupted me with:
Ein Kebab bitte! Viel Sauce!
Ever since, I’ve described my German to others as Kebabverkäuferlich. Kebab-sellerish.
You won’t be surprised to hear that when I was in Vienna, my best conversations in German were with cab drivers. We shared that kebab substrate.
Italian
I never actually learned Italian; I just reconstructed it from Latin and Esperanto. But I did hang out with Italian lecturers, and I got more of the intonation than I did in German. I actually modelled myself after the guy I was research assistant for—who is Slovene–Croat and L2 Italian. He’s fluent, but his accent was a little blunted, which I found less intimidating to imitate.
I don’t double consonants (because Greek), and any alternation of long and short vowels are probably accidental. But I was confident enough with my Italian, that I did get asked in Desenzano del Garda whether I was from Friuli. (They assumed I was from the next county rather than the next country.)
Latin
Greek. No long vowels at all. Closer to classical than church Latin, modulo /v/, but… yeah, less said the better.
Esperanto
Greek. Hilariously, Greek and Spanish are meant to be the model accents for Esperanto, because Esperanto is not meant to have long and short vowels; but the older reference grammar deplored Greek accents as sound like machine gun fire.
Come to think of it, yes, that’s what my Esperanto sounds like too.
Lojban
Eh, Greek with sibilants? Lojban is a hard language to speak fluently, because you have to think in nested parentheses; but in between the rat-tat-tat accent and the rushing through the bits between nested parentheses, I think I was hard for anyone else to follow.
Klingon
My Klingon does not sound Greek. With phonemes like <q, Q, D, S, tlh> /qʰ, qχ, ɖ, ʂ, tɬ/, it really couldn’t.
My Klingon sounds New Zealandish.
The vowels of Klingon are described by their author… impressionalistically. He’s writing for Trekkies, after all, not professional linguists. The author emphasised how lax the <I> is, and that it’s not an /i/. (That’s why it’s capitalised: to show that it’s not the same as <i>.)
I… took the laxing a bit too seriously. It was intended to be /ɪ/, I ended up producing /ɨ/. When I first spoke Klingon to other Klingonists, they were sure I was saying /ɛ/.
Apart from that, my gutturals are probably on the lenis side. It’s still meant to be a language, not performance art.
Why do we call 5th century BC Greek the Classical period?
The word Classics is derived from the Latin adjective classicus, meaning “belonging to the highest class of citizens”. The word was originally used to describe the members of the highest class in ancient Rome. By the 2nd century AD the word was used in literary criticism to describe writers of the highest quality. For example, Aulus Gellius, in his Attic Nights, contrasts “classicus” and “proletarius” writers.
The writers of 5th century Athens were considered to be the pinnacle of Greek writing—the orators, the dramatists, the historians. (Not so the poets, which was more an 8th to 6th century thing.) Their version of Greek was considered the most prestigious and was the model for all subsequent writing.
So they were the classical authors—the authors of the highest class, as judged by subsequent Latin-speaking generations; and their period was called the Classical period.
After marriage, why do women have to change their surname?
Hm. Surprised at the low level of anthropology here. Lots of value judgements on both sides, but not a whole lot of history.
OK. The answer is tied up with patrilocality. See for example Why did society shift to patrilocality after the Neolithic agricultural revolution? And Patrilocal residence on Wikipedia.
Patrilocality is the arrangement where, when a woman marries a man, they don’t go off and make their own household: they stay with the household the man belongs to.
If you’ve just invented agriculture, and you rely on access to land for subsistence, then patrilocality makes a lot of sense. You don’t want to keep splitting up the family farm with every generation of kids, until it’s down to a postage stamp; and you don’t want to give a bit of the farm away to someone who isn’t going to stick around and help farm it. Patrilocality makes a lot of economic sense; it’s only in the modern, post-agricultural West that it makes any sense for new families to establish their own households.
Of course, patrilocality is not the only way of resolving the issue of how to keep the family farm in one piece. You can also have Matrilocal residence, where the couple stays with the household the woman belongs to. But that doesn’t mean that matrilocal societies are feminist paradises. From what Wikipedia tells me, in many matrilocal societies, the husband stays with his family, and only visits the wife “in their spare time” (so he can still tend to his parents’ farm). The father is disinherited from his own children (who stay with the mother)—but brings up his sister’s children (who are staying with their mother); so the family farm still stays together.
In any case, even if these practices start out because they make economic sense, they are perpetuated as tradition and value judgements. When Bing Sanchez (who lives in Greece) told me she was going to ask a variant of this question, I asked her to ask around for the definition of a sogambros.
Greece is traditionally a patrilocal society. A sogambros, literally an “inside son-in-law”, is matrilocal: he’s someone who’s living with his wife’s kin, instead of his own.
Traditionally, this is considered embarrassing.
There’s nothing rational about the embarrassment in modern society; in fact, there’s nothing rational about it even in traditional society. But the social pressure helps maintain patrilocality, and having either consistent patrilocality or consistent matrilocality is rational: everyone knows the rules, no scope for inheritance disputes (which would turn deadly in a subsistence economy), and the family farms stay intact.
What’s all that got to do with surnames?
The group identity of an extended family originates in the bunch of people who have the family farm in common, through inheritance. In patrilocal societies, that inheritance is from father to son.
Ditto surnames. Having the same surname means you’re part of the group who gets to farm the same family farm.
It’s as simple as that. And if you’re getting married into the family farm as a woman, you take the family’s surname, because you too will be tending to the family farm.
Zeibura undertakes some archaeology
This is not a drawing I drew. This is a drawing the most excellent Zeibura S. Kathau drew, demonstrating that just as he is no amateur linguist, he is also no amateur surrealist.
As often happens with these cartoons, the artist gatecrashed banter between Quorans.
The banter started here: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Lat…
Jeebus. Remind me never to pick a fight with you in an Indo-European language. You didn’t like Grammatikos as a nickname, so I was going to tag “morphology” to dub you “Morphophilios.” But then it hit me. In psychiatric practice, morphophilia “refers to the gaining of sexual pleasure and ‘arousal from a person with a different physique’ whereas a definition provided by the less academic Quipper website says it is simply the ‘love of odd body shapes.’”
Me:
…
Nothing odd about the body shape that I… oh, never mind. Though you know what I’m alluding to 🙂
I’ll take Grammaticus! Puts me in the same company as Saxo Grammaticus.
[Whatever I’m alluding to, it’s not as bad as you’re thinking 🙂 ]
Zeibura:
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Lat…
2100 and archaeologists in county Mayo uncover evidence of Nick Nicholas and Robert Todd having banter in Old Irish
What are some good memes about the coup attempt in Turkey, July 2016?
OP, asked because I saw these in my Facebook feed:
Before: Under PASOK. After: Under SYRIZA.
Come back! Or at least give me a call!
Add me! I’ve been blocked!
[Erdoğan citing a Greek pop song about Lara Novakov’s favourite holiday destination]
I’m seeking asylum in Chalkidiki.
Because “there’s no place like Chalkidiki.”
Is the Holy Spirit (ruach hakodesh) the wife of God, and is the Holy Spirit the only feminine being in Heaven?
Depends on your theology, but mostly, no.
The female personification of Wisdom in the Sapiential Books in and out of the Hebrew Scriptural canon (including Proverbs) is as close as Judaism got to a female aspect of divinity. It’s not very close.
Spirit in Hebrew is the feminine noun ruach, and if Hebrew had any role in the development of the Christian notion of the Trinity, you could have seen something like a feminine aspect of divinity in Christianity. But spirit is neuter in Greek (pneuma ) and masculine in Latin (spiritus), so that’s not the direction the Trinity went. The Orthodox/Catholic understanding of a female being in Heaven ended up being the Virgin Mary instead, as intercessor rather than Godhead.
So, standard flavours of Judaism and Christianity have not gone there. I see from the first link I googled (The Feminine Aspect of the Godhead) that there were Gnostic trends to associate the Holy Spirit with femininity, and that the Gospel of the Hebrews referred to the Holy Spirit as a mother. So some theologians have thought so, but most have not.
How do Australians feel when they are mistaken for being English?
Quite a variety of answers here.
I’ve gotten that from Americans, usually followed by some bizarre mélange of Bostonian English and Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins as they tried to impersonate me.
As we say here: “Yeah… no.”
Slightly miffed, but more at the other’s unfamiliarity with Australians than at the comparison. Normally.
In fact, my good friend George Baloglou, Greek who worked for a long time in America, used the confusion in a way I found flatteringly insightful. He was describing me to a third party in Greece, and he said:
“Picture a guy who looks like a typical Greek greengrocer. And is culturally British.”
(The author, 1993)