I was over at XIX век and happened to glance at the list of Russian literature sites in the right margin, and my eye fell on the obdurately lowercase obdurodon. When I clicked through, I found an amazing collection of “Digital humanities projects,” many of them Russian-related, from The annotated Afanas′ev library (“Selected Russian fairy tales from the Aleksandr Afanas′ev collection with glosses and linguistic and cultural annotation”) to Twitter register variation (“Corpus-based study of linguistic properties of English-language tweets”). It’s well worth checking out. And “obdurodon”? Per Wikipedia, it’s “a genus of extinct platypus-like Australian monotreme which lived from the Late Oligocene to the Late Miocene”:
The holotype tooth was placed into the newly erected genus Obdurodon upon description in 1975 by American palaeontologists Michael O. Woodburne and Richard H. Tedford. They named the genus from the Latin obduro “persist” and the Greek ὀδών (odṓn) “tooth”, in reference to the permanency of the molars, a feature which is lost in the modern platypus.
So it’s a bastard formation, but if I can take “television,” I guess I can take “obdurodon.” (It’s not in the OED yet even though it’s been known and named for half a century.) I have no idea why the site is called that, but there’s an image of a pair of them at the top of the main page, and it’s quite cute.
I have no idea why the site is called that
Explained in the last item:
Ah well, that explains that, then!
As if all those sauruses were not bastards:)
What would have been wrong with the more consistently Latinate “obdurodent”?
What, even Kollikodon (the one with molars shaped like hot cross buns)?
Hurry up and register Kollikodon.org!
Are you sure this hasn’t already been trademarked for a toothpaste?
Are you sure this hasn’t already been trademarked for a toothpaste?
Apparently not: Your search did not match any documents. (Of course, once Google indexes this page that will no longer be true.)
What would have been wrong with the more consistently Latinate “obdurodent”?
-odon is a translingual standard. Systematic scientific naming conventions are properly disdainful of the anti-bastardism lobby.
F’doy, monotremes aren’t rodents!
Or are they???
(WikiP Obdurodon)
{WikiP says “rakali”, but the citation says:
)
So there you go. Obdurodent.
(WikiP Rakali:
)
“obdurodent”
wouldn’t it be obdurodens?
As I think I previously observed, it’s convenient in a way that living monotremes appear to be a monophyletic group. Obviously, all mammals are descended from egg-laying ancestors, but the only surviving lineage that has hair and gives milk but does not give birth to live offspring split off relatively early.
Indeed there’s some evidence that the surviving monotremes are more closely related to each other than to Obdurodon – that echidnas are secondarily terrestrial platypuzzesses…
Fishes tend to end in -odus rather than -odon, BTW.
“Systematic scientific naming conventions are properly disdainful…” – don’t know which one of these two is better:
1. Systematic scientific naming conventions are properly.
2. Systematic scientific naming conventions are properly disdainful.
But both are good:)
Greek or Latin don’t do very well at creating gracious compound words. Mixing the two together makes it worse as it creates aesthetic monstrosities. They should form neologisms using Germanic elements. Obdurodon could be called dauerzahn (from the German) or hallbartand (from the Swedish for durable tooth).
Greek very much does. Latin doesn’t (well, hasn’t since Plautus).
Joermungandr
Jormungandr (with a barbarous vowel cluster in the species name)
@Charles Jaeger.
People get used to words conaining morphemes coming from more than one language. Presumably you object to the words sociology (English), sociologie (French), sociología (Spanish), and so on because they contain one morpheme of Latin origin and one of Greek origin.
People get used to words conaining morphemes coming from more than one language.
People can get used to anything, but that doesn’t mean they have to like it. I have been complaining (mildly) about bastard words for years. It’s not a big deal, obviously, but to me (and others) it is aesthetically preferable to have both parts of a compound word from the same source. You are free, of course, to join the vast majority of humanity in disagreeing.
LH, but in names of species?
They are systematically messy (and pretend to be borrowings in Latin)…
“Jormungandr walhallaensis” has its own mild bit of bastardy, with the first half being taken straight from Old Norse (maybe losing a diacritical mark) but the second half having passed from ON via German which changed the “v” in Valhalla to a “w.” (The border county in North Dakota where the fossil was found has an unusually high percentage of Icelandic-Americans and even more Norwegian-Americans, but also lots of German-Americans and the latter group must have fixed the spelling of the relevant local toponym.)
@David M. Sure, but not at the level that German or Persian or Mandarin can. And this is the level that would be most useful given the desire of modern science to see multiple elements crammed into one word. I don’t see how Eiweißstoff or Düsenfleugzeug could be calqued as a single word in Greek because that language can’t easily handle the compounding of more than two elements. The normal practice would have been to say aeriothumenon (where aeroplanon is implied) or ooleukoma (but normally the language would reject a construction with three elements like ooleukohyle or something).
Jormungandr is a mythological name and I don’t personally like the practice of using mythology (or the personal names of those who discovered them) to name species. I would stick with naming based on attributes.
@M. Yeah sociology looks ugly even in name. Coenology or cenology (to koinon was a common expression for community or league) would work better.
LH, but in names of species?
No, that’s a different thing. I’m talking about everyday words. Let Linnaeus be Linnaeus!
Wiki uses “hybrid words” as the generic label for these Latin-Greek combos like “television” and “homosexual,” which I guess is intended to sound neutral and non-pejorative. “Bastard” and its relatives are certainly pejorative, although there may be a problem with the metaphor if examined too closely because AFAIK all human societies that deprecated illegitimacy had multiple ways in which a child might be deemed illegitimate – it’s not simply a word whose core meaning generally or primarily implies violation of a local taboo against exogamy.
Speaking of mythological names, I think I’ve seen “chimera” used as a label for this sort of word although now I can’t quickly google up confirmation. That’s perhaps nice because while “chimera” has a pejorative ring in modern English it contrasts with other mix-and-match mythological critters like the griffon which don’t have that overtone. Or the centaur although I guess the donkey-centaurs we were talking about the other day in connection with LXX Greek might.
JWB, reminded me how in around 1990 RSUH in Moscow was energetically developing the science of “centauristics”. Or I thought so because their bookstores were full of books about it.
I have no idea what it is:)
(RSUH was one of two best places where you could study humanities in Moscow.
In 90s and 00s was the best for linguistics.)
LH, then I think I agree.
I don’t know how often they annoy me, but I think if I were coining a word I’d have tried not to mix up them. (But I won’t call a Berberologist “Barbarolog”)
around 1990 RSUH in Moscow was energetically developing the science of “centauristics”.
Wonderful! I’m not even going to google it — I don’t want to spoil the mystery.
Oh, Linnaeus was quite peevish about how to form names. It’s just that the botanists have cared little and the zoologists not at all. 🙂
No hybridity at all is involved in words like “television.” All the components are English morphemes, just like “very”, “they” and “blame”, though one is a bound rather than a free morpheme.
The fact that the Romans appear to have had no words for “television” or “bicycle” has no relevance whatever to English word-formation.
Some purist had his fingers in the pie in Denmark, WIWAL gays were homofile. (And I say his advisedly, I’m pretty sure that usage was fixed back when only men were listened to).
@Lars: “homophile” was and maybe still is a cromulent English word but did not do well over time in marketplace competition against rival synonyms. It does now maybe have a semi-archaic flavor, but I think once upon a time (like 50-60 years ago) it was used by some as a positive-valence endonym. See, e.g., this sentence I found via google books in a 2012 historical work: “Dismissing the homophile movement encouraged post- Stonewall activists to concentrate on the present and future, but in the process they lost valuable opportunities to learn from the past.”
To David E.’s point: I might agree that at present tele- is a reasonably productive English prefix, but I’m not convinced that was already the case when “television” was coined, esp. with the word being coined some decades before the technology was developed enough to be ready to go to market for a mass audience. “Television” obviously fit a pre-existing pattern (telescope, telegraph, telephone all being older) but it may have been the massive success of television itself that made the prefix more freely productive. It was circa the 1930’s that “telecommunication(s)” started to come into widespread use among technical types as an umbrella label comprehending telegraphy and telephony and wireless technologies as well, and that may have been a key development in prefix-productivity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Linguists_from_Denmark lists 5 female translators from the 18th century and… er.
3 female linguists from the 20th century all born around 1880. (3 f 16 m)
Maria Mikkelsen (said to be a writer and translator in the article), Ingeborg Hammer-Jensen, Lis Jacobsen.
3 more in “philologists”, one of them also born in 1878. (5 f 15 m)
I think Denmark is not like Russia (philology is for girls) but I wonder why those girls gathered around 1880.
Ah, wait. I checked “20th-century Danish linguists” but not “Linguists from Denmark” (8 f 19 m and a more meaningful distribution).
It seems women born in the 19th century are more likely to be tagged as “20th-century … linguists”… and less likely to be tagged “linguists from …”
@David Eddyshaw
There IS hybridity involved in words like television i.e. between an etymologically Greek and an etymologically Latin element. English boarded Britain as a West Germanic language. Every other element in the modern English lexicon (French, Norse, Latin etc.) is a foreign transplant to English. The fact that the term radius is understood and accepted in modern English doesn’t negate its latinity one bit.
DE knows that perfectly well, of course, he’s just making the point that once the elements enter English they become English, whatever their origin. Which is perfectly reasonable and in theory I agree, but in practice I jib.
You can look for English-internal clues as to whether a particular group of non-Anglo-Saxon-origin morphemes behave distinctively in English in how they do or don’t combine into compounds. I believe there are some such patterns – it’s not like a word gets naturalized and immediately assimilates into an undifferentiated lexicon. But OTOH, take a word like “abruptness,” combining a Latinate adjective (borrowed straight from Latin w/o passing through French) with a good old West-Germanic suffix. You could call that hybridity, but that would to some extent be missing the point that -ness is such a productive suffix you can stick it onto pretty much any adjective there is.
To get back to DE’s example of tele-, it is now sufficiently productive that you can match it not only with Latin-not-Greek morphemes, but with West-Germanic morphemes, as in “telemeeting,” which the OED says was attested as early as 1956.
And of course, sometimes these things go the other way. What with the radical collapse of classical learning in the medical profession you sometimes get oddities like the recent trend (maybe US-only?) to say/write “fatty liver disease” instead of “hepatic steatosis.”
Quite a few non-Latinate forms have always been solidly at home in at least UK doctorspeak, including the terms we use among ourselves. In my own line of work, “squint” is what you write on the operating list, for example, not “strabismus”, and I had some trouble just now even remembering the word “hordeolum” (a word which appears nowhere in Virgil; moreover, the real Latin word seems to be “hordeolus.”)
We UK medics have more effective ways of obfuscating our trade secrets. Our American colleagues are evidently mere amateurs in such matters. Speaking bad Latin in front of the patient is so eighteenth-century.
The cognoscenti use Kusaal. (Except in Ghana, of course.)
Of course.
Apart from anything else, Kusaal forms compound nouns (of total linguistic purity) much more freely than any mere Indo-European language.
And at the end of the day, it’s all about the compounds.
https://www.lyricsondemand.com/s/scaffoldlyrics/lilythepinklyrics.html
The things you discover: Elton John (still Reg Dwight) and Tim Rice are backing singers on the song, and an earlier version was known to William Carlos Wlliams and Ezra Pound:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_the_Pink_(song)
Well known as Fettleber in German. (Evidently regarded as one symptom of Alkoholismus, not as a disease of its own.)
Messrs. Dwight & Rice were obscure nobodies at the time; Graham Nash’s backing vocals would have added notably more cachet or credibility to the project.
When excessive booze is not the obvious causal factor, American liver-diagnosers also have NASH (“non-alcoholic steatohepatitis”), which is kinda sorta being supplanted by NAFLD, but holds on a bit because it’s easy to pronounce as a rhymes-with-bash acronym.
Oikoumenology
@JWB @Lars:
“homophile” was a key term, internationally, in the second-ish (mid-20thC) wave of gay men’s organizing (in some places/times/contexts it was used gender-inclusively, but in others not). like other earlier terms that didn’t come from vernacular usage – “urning”, “invert”, etc – it never got much traction as a point of personal identification, but it was very much used to describe the category, and in organizational contexts.
in the u.s., the Mattachine Society (the first major u.s. gay political organization, which emerged from harry hay’s abortive Bachelors for [Henry] Wallace effort) described itself as a homophile group, and through the 1950s and 60s the whole emerging network of gay and lesbian groups was established through coalition structures like ECHO (East Coast Homophile Organizations) and NACHO (North American Conference of Homophile Organizations).
following the series of uprisings that peaked at Stonewall in 1969, “homophile” was pretty quickly abandoned in the u.s., with the new wave of organizing setting it aside along with the earlier organizations’ conservative strategic approach, and taking up terms of identification from vernacular use: “gay”, most significantly, but also “fairy”, “queer”, “fag”, “dyke”, etc.
that’s been most definitive among gay men. things have been a little more complicated among gay women, where “lesbian” (and more recently “sapphic”) have been persistently widespread in both organizational and individual use, and have become vernacular, even to some extent displacing established terms of identification (“dyke”, especially) that aren’t respectable enough for some people’s taste. and in the trans side of things, the medicalized terms (“transsexual”, “transvestite”, etc) have maintained an even stronger hold – largely, i think, because of the persistence of direct medical and state control over trans people’s bodies – with vernacular terms that aren’t derived from the sexological sphere (as the now-rare “teevee” is, for example) rarely being taken up by organizations at all.
“Sapphic” has the advantage of evoking one of humanity’s greatest lyric poets (and one who actually sang about the subject, too) though I must admit that this may be a somewhat niche recommendation.
“Lesbian” just sounds like a poorly-attested Anatolian language. The term lacks poetry. Even Catullus can’t rescue it from that, and his darling seems to have had the wrong orientation anyway (though he did do a rather good Latin version of one of Sappho’s poems, so there is that.)
@Owlmirror
Oikoumene means the whole of the inhabited world so I don’t think so. Cenology is good because it can be interpreted not only as deriving from ‘to koinon’ i.e. community but also from ‘to kenon’ i.e. void, emptiness which fairly describes the state of sociology these days.
Homosexual or homophile is indeed atrocious. No idea why they didn’t just make it arsenophile (gay man) or thelycophile (gay woman). Ecdysiac would be a fine term for a trans person (from the Ecdysia festival).
Plutarch says somewhere that the Greeks call sex ‘ousia’ and ‘apousia’ the watershed point of intercourse i.e. ejaculation or orgasm. Apousy would arguably be a better term for orgasm because ‘orgasmos’ meant arousal or horniness in general and not the culmination of arousal. Apousy also has the advantage that it rhymes well with a certain English word that eludes me.
“Ecdysiac” would be too confusingly similar (IMHO) to “ecdysiast,” famously coined by Mencken* in response to request by a stripper for a more high-class-sounding synonym for her profession.
*From the zoological jargon-word ecdysis and ultimately from ἔκδυσις.
Plutarch says somewhere
Plutarch uses ἀπουσία and συνουσία in Περὶ Ἴσιδος καὶ Ὀσίριδος (‘On Isis and Osiris’) 34, Moralia, book v., page 83–84 in the old Loeb edition here (Greek on p. 82, English on page 83), or in French here here (chapter 34):
For this meaning of ἀπουσία, the footnote in the Loeb edition offers a comparison with the verb ἀπουσιάζω in Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 1.78 (on the interpretation of dreams of having sex with various sorts of people of both genders and of various ages and social stations):
Translation taken from Daniel E. Harris-McCoy (2012) Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica: Text, Translation, and Commentary. The phrase ‘signifies everything in common with the son of the same age’ (ἐπίσης τῷ υἱῷ σημαίνει) means that sex with a small son foretells the death of the child, as described in the paragraph immediately before.
@J. W. Brewer
Strippers entertain their customers by offering a show that is basically choreographed ogling. ὀπιπεύω was the common verb for ogling and one finds constructions like parthenopipes (ogler of girls). We could use the middle-passive form of the verb to construct a meaning ‘to present oneself for ogling’ and arrive at the corresponding feminine participle to designate a stripper i.e. opipeuomene. So we could end up with something like ‘opipeuomenous performer’. Because it’s hard to pronounce we could just tear it down to ‘peomenous’. Funnily enough, this sounds very similar to peos (penis).
For transgender persons another idea would be this: in German the mathematical term Vorzeichen (sign) for the plus and minus symbols is often used in philosophy. We could conceive of the male-female binary as a difference in Vorzeichen. The Greek term for this is prosemon. So an ‘antiprosemous individual’ would be someone who carries a different ‘gender sign’ to the one conventionally assigned to him/her/it by society.
@Xerib
Good job! Synousia seems to be from syneimi (come together) which makes it etymologically analogous to Latin coeo/coitus. Apousia seems to be from apeimi (go away, depart). Whereas we conceive of the act of ejaculation as ‘I’m coming’, it appears that the Greeks conceived it as ‘I’m going away’.
@cj
Antipro is good, as in Anti-pro-abortion activist (no disrepect to your namesake, the late C. Kirk), with the subtly different anti-pro-abortion-activist.
“I’m going off”?
> “Sapphic” has the advantage of evoking one of humanity’s greatest lyric poets
I’ve occasionally seen attempts to coin a sufficiently referential parallel term for gay men. Most recently, “Achillean” — but that immediately devolved into an argument whether Achilles is problematic. (Which raises the amusing question of what Ancient Greek reference *wouldn’t* be problematic to the people making this objection.)
Achilles thought the Trojan War was tough… until he encountered cancel culture!
Pelopidasian, for the commander of the Sacred Band of Thebes, would be better. Among other things, like Sapphic, it refers to a historical, rather than legendary, person—moreover, one who was one of the most important champions of Boeotian democracy.
Historically the mock-classical coinage parallel to [L/l]esbian but for males was [U/u]ranian, which alas ultimately failed to prosper. At least in the Anglophone world, part of the problem was no doubt that the decline of classical learning meant that not too many people knew about even the muse Urania, much less about the kinda/sorta pro-homophile opinions Plato ascribed to Aphrodite Urania. Nor were they likely to pick up the more general “celestial, heavenly” connotations lurking in the etymology. Eventually, the only thing that was transparent rather than opaque was that Uranian evokes Uranus, which has unfortunate homophones. Heh heh, he said Uranus, etc.
One problem with using Achillean or Pelopidasian and so on is that none of these were portrayed as being homosexuals though Sappho probably was truly a Lesbian. A male homosexual is one exclusively interested in men and these people were called kinaidos, kybales, lastauros, katapygos etc. Bisexuality was so normalized in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world that a certain ancient historian writes that of all the Roman Emperors only Claudius was said to be exclusively interested in females. Another problem with names like Ganymede, Uranian, Achillean or Lesbian is that they valorize homosexuality where the point is just to make a value-neutral term for formal use. I don’t see how it could get more neutral than, say, arrenophilous man/theleophilous woman.
The terms also have to be technically correct and this is surprisingly often not the case. For example, the Latin term ‘cunnilingus’ only means the person who does the act, not the act itself as used today. Byttolexia (βύττος + λειξία) would work better here. Clitoris is an authentic word that appears in Polydeuces (Julius Pollux) with the current meaning but I wonder how it came to be that the word nymphe (chiefly meaning ‘bride’) also acquired the meaning clitoris. It sounds unlikely but maybe it developed from the entomological meaning. The clitoral glans is protected by the clitoral hood similarly to how the insect larva is protected by the cocoon. Maybe there is a some visual similarity too when the clitoris is engorged. But then again, how did the entomological meaning even develop in a word with the most common meaning of ‘bride’? In any case the term ‘nymphomaniac’ sounds hilarious when you think that νύμφη also meant clitoris.
@David M. Yeah, same thing. I suppose it developed from people initially only using the third person present and saying ‘it’s going off’, i.e. ‘it’s blasting off’, then it spread to the first and second persons and from there to all other tenses.
Sappho probably was truly a Lesbian.
She was certainly a (capitalized) Lesbian, in that she was from the island of Lesbos; if you think she was certainly a lesbian in the modern sense, you are fooling yourself. We know almost nothing about her life; all we have are her poems.
Another problem with names like Ganymede, Uranian, Achillean or Lesbian is that they valorize homosexuality
Huh? They’re just words; it’s people who choose to “valorize” or not. You seem to have some strange preconceptions and subterranean agendas, which I prefer not to investigate.
The Greeks did not conceptualise these things in the way that we do at all, so looking for historical “accuracy” in finding a paradigm classical analogue of “a homosexual” is a fool’s errand. What the Greeks thought was creditable or discreditable when it came to sex does not align either with reactionary para-Christian views or modern liberal ones.
In such circumstances, objecting to any particular term, like “Achillean”, on the grounds of historical inaccuracy is as daft as avoiding the word “disaster” on the grounds that to use it is to countenance astrology. Or declaring that Keats never wrote a Horatian ode, because he wasn’t actually Horace, and didn’t write in a Latin.
I like Brett’s Pelopidasian, not only because the name refers to an actual real person, but because the actual point of the Theban Sacred Band was male homosexuality. The difficulty with classical antecedents for our notions of sexuality is that (to our way of thinking) the Greeks assumed that everyone was “bisexual”, so it’s not easy to come up with instances where a person is famous chiefly because of their sexual orientation. We don’t even know that Sappho was anything but ordinary in her orientation for that time and place. But so what?
“Pelopidasian” strikes me as ill-formed morphologically, though. Perhaps a stealth-Atticised “Pelopidean”?
The taxonomists have had fun with that one.
“Disasterina” would be a pretty name for a girl.* Right up there with “Polyester”, “Chlamydia” or “Porphyria.” On reflection, perhaps more suitable for a supervillainess. It would be wasted on an accountant, or even on a university professor. (Admittedly, there may be some overlap of these categories.)
* “Sassy”, to her friends.
We’ve had a Porphyria, but no parent would call down her fate on their daughter.
Well, there’s this one, from the reliably cringe Browning:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46313/porphyrias-lover
J.W. Brewer:
It’s true that “television” was coined early — the OED has it from 1900. But even then, the prefix was exploding in productivity: the Century Dictionary (1895) already had dozens of tele- words. In 1911 the OED entered tele- as a combining form “used in numerous (chiefly recent) scientific and technical terms” (as well as “psychical” ones) with a long list, including television and its doomed rival telephote.
(I’m amused to discover that “telepathy” and “telekinesis” were not coined in science fiction but in late-19th-century woo.)
Actually, the massive success of television resulted in the extension of the prefix to things connected specifically with television, e.g. telegenic (1936), tele-studios (1938), teleplay, telejournalism.
@David Eddyshaw: I agree that Pelopidasian is morphologically infelicitous. My first thought was actually “Pelopidean,” just as you suggest, but that word already had a history of occasional use to denote things related to the Pelopides (a thoroughly nasty* bunch from Tantalus on down).
* Of course, as with so many things about ancient Greek culture, most of what we know comes from northerly (and particularly Attic) sources. Athenian mythographers could differ quite a bit on how the family was portrayed. Even without Taplow’s collaboration, Aeschylus is fairly sympathetic in Agamemnon. Yet Euripides portrayed him as an unreconstructed villain, especially in Iphigenia in Aulis, which records a tradition (which may not be attested in any other surviving sources) that Agamemnon had taken Clytemnestra as a war prize, having killed her first husband in battle and then personally murdered her infant son.
So there was at least a strong negative current in Athenian attitudes toward the Pelopides. However, views of the family could be very different on the Isle of Pelops itself. There were shrines devoted to Pelops, Agamemnon, and Menelaus, but the rites associated with them and even their locations** are unknown. The classical Laconians were infamously close mouthed about their local religious traditions.
** These may have the legendary locations of their tombs. On the other hand, in Roman times, Pausanias reported a tradition that Agamemmnon had been buried inside the walls of Mycenae (certainly a more logical interment site than anywhere in Laconia). Schliemann took this to mean that he was buried inside the walls of the citadel itself, rather than the old curtain walls of the city. In a sense, Schliemann’s reading was correct, as his excavations uncovered the circle of Helladic graves the tradition referred to. The dead wanax he found wearing the so-called Mask of Agamemnon must have lived a couple hundred years before the Trojan War period, but there were some other traditions Pausanias recorded about the contents of the graves that were so accurate and specific that they must have been passed down by the locals for over a thousand years.
I suppose one might follow the analogy of the use of “Lesbian” as a surrogate for “Sapphic”, and just say “Theban.”
“Boeotian” is unfortunately already taken, as far as non-literal meanings go. (Though I suspect that the Young People of Today may be unfamiliar with this sense. And the Old People of Today too, for that matter.)
“Gorgidean”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgidas
@David Eddyshaw: I don’t think Theban works, for historical reasons. The practice of conflating the region of Boeotia with its leading city goes back thousands of years. However, the distinction between the two was actual very important during the heyday of the Sacred Band. At the Battle of Leuctra, one of the things the Boeotians were fighting for was the right to have a unified government and military for the whole of the region, whereas the Spartans wanted to forbid Greek communities in other regions from forming leagues. In a manufactured diplomatic incident, at a peace conference during an interlude in the war, after the Spartans had signed the treaty on behalf of Laconia (as they always had done before), Epaminondas had withdrawn the Theban delegates’ signatures and demanded that they be allowed to resign on behalf of all of Boeotia.
Right up there with “Polyester”, “Chlamydia” or “Porphyria.”
Meine Schwester heißt Polyester. And as we’re at German humorous songs about funny names, and as the guy is mentioned in this thread, here is a song about a poor sod whose parents called him Agamemnon.
Perhaps it would be otherwise in German-speaking societies, but in an Anglophone context the fact that the poly- prefix is homophonous with the well-established “Polly” means you ideally want to split poly-containing compound words into a first and last name, as witness the much-missed Poly Styrene (in the world Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, 1957-2011).
In German we respect the singularity of the L and render the O long, so this wouldn’t even work.
Aga- Aga- Aga- Agamemnon!
I don’t. The syllable is unstressed, so it’s either [o] or [ɔ] (I tend to the latter), but [oː] only in dictation.
I had a math teacher who made a point of pronouncing the o in logisch and Logik short and open.
Ah.
Some of these things, inevitably, do vary. Mega- basically gets /eː/ in Germany but /ɛ/ in Austria.
I don’t. The syllable is unstressed, so it’s either [o] or [ɔ] (I tend to the latter), but [oː] only in dictation.
I have a closed [o] there, but it’s shorter than a stressed [o:].
I had a math teacher who made a point of pronouncing the o in logisch and Logik short and open
Now that’s simply weird, but math teachers are allowed to be.
the extension of the prefix to things connected specifically with television
and the clipping telly is occasionally (mis?)spelt tele.
“(mis?)spelt tele” — the OED does recognize that spelling. Can’t recall ever noticing it in the wild myself, but Merriam-Webster also has it: “less common spelling of telly. British, informal”.
I have seen it used occasionally. These were I think early written uses of the abbreviation, before television was widely spread, and there was no fixed spelling yet.
She never bothered to explain it, but, looking back, I think her reason was that the Greek had a short -o-.
What are even good Ancient Greek words for the concept of “sex” as opposed to “gender” (if the Ancient Greeks even had two concepts to differentiate)? Sure L -sexualis is a near match for G -φίλος in some contexts like homophile/homosexual, never mind that Pāṇini might claim they are two different kinds of compound, but that’s about orientation, not biology.
(Also I just realized that the word homosexual [hetero-, pan-, bi-] presupposes that whom you fall in love with only depends on what kind of body they have. I don’t think that’s universally true, but recognizing the sex/gender distinction probably postdates the words).
“early written uses of the abbreviation, before television was widely spread” — Not just early; search for “on the tele”, you’ll find current examples. GloWbE has it clustered in GB and AU.
On the tele- the people who say “down the pub” might say this with a different final vowel to “telly”, more like “on the tell-eh” (= Edward) or “on the tell-ay”(= maybe)
I once had a flatmate from Bahnslah who used to watch tellah. She also used to go dahn(t) poob on occasion.
GloWbE has it clustered in GB and AU.
GloWbE shows tele is far less common than telly in GB; less so in AU, still less in parts of Asia. I withdraw my Eurocentric suggestion that it’s a misspelling.
Some distance west of Oklahoma in the U.S. you can get gnomic combinations like:
Tucson to Tucumcari,
Tehachapi to Tonapah.
But those suggest motion/arrival, rather than being pure locatives of the destination.
That’s -romantic, not -sexual. Sexual and romantic orientation line up for most people, it seems, but not for all.
She never bothered to explain it, but, looking back, I think her reason was that the Greek had a short -o-
Well, I guessed that was the reason, but it’s still weird. Did she also pronounce other Graecisms with original vowel length?
It’s a pity that “homoerotic” has never really taken off outside pretty scholarly contexts.
Krafft-Ebing hisownself seems to have been the originator of the term “homosexual”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Krafft-Ebing
which probably teaches us that such terminological matters should not be entrusted to the medical profession. (In defence of K-E, while his medicalised notions are none too acceptable nowadays, they did mark a notable improvement over most of his predecessors.)
@David, that’s true, but it’s still not telling us whether it’s the sex or the gender of the object of desire that has to be hetero- or something else.
whom you want to fuck, then. Happy now?
Homoeopothicolagnia. (You’ve got to admit that it’s catchy.)
Not to be confused with homoeopathicolagnia, the desire to have sex with homoeopaths.
Re “homoeopathicolagnia,” I now recall that 35 years ago I spent a summer living in a sublet apartment a block or two away from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Hahnemann_Monument. I’m not sure if I ever went by there late at night, and for all I know it was, back in those ungentrified days, a hot spot for furtive assignations among those interested in that sort of thing.
It is not for us to judge.
From there:
See? That’s how to do it right.
Overcompensating for something?
It is possible that Krafft-Ebing himself suffered from homoeopathicolagnia, in its alternative sense of “having sex in amounts so small as to be essentially undetectable.” Alas, we just don’t know.
Maybe he noticed his Kraft ebbing.
Thread won (as DM says …)
@languagehat It might be that I am laboring under strange preconceptions in my bunker where I plan my nefarious schemes but I think billions of other people would easily agree that writing homoerotic poems is solid evidence of homosexual feelings and that the presence of homosexual feelings is evidence of homosexuality. Sappho’s reputation as a woman that loves women existed already in antiquity.
Achilles is chiefly portrayed as a war hero, as rexinor thymoleon (lion-hearted breaker of men). To call homosexuals Achillean is first of all farcical because of the obvious fact that homosexuals aren’t noted for their ‘Achillean’ character, they were called ‘effeminate’ in antiquity for an objective reason. Second, the Iliad opens with Achilles squabbling with his leader over the possession of a slave girl he has taken a fancy to. That’s not a very homosexual motive. Third, the point of creating neologisms is to make neutral terms (rather than ‘dyke’ and ‘fag’ and ‘trailer-queens’) and calling homosexuals by the name of a legendary hero is not value neutral. It’s not ‘just a word’, words have a history and it matters. That history should be taken into account when using old lexical material to create new lexical material.
There are many derogatory terms for passive homosexuals (anthropologically speaking, the vast majority of homosexuals are pathici) in Greco-Roman antiquity. These derogatory terms obviously reflect homophobic sentiments which also candidly appear in literature. So the idea that there was an enormous difference between the general sentiments of our time and the sentiments of Greek antiquity regarding passive homosexuality is at best exaggerated. The Greeks didn’t regard passive homosexuality as unnatural or illegal but they definitely regarded as it as shameful for mature men. Nor is the idea that active homosexuality is permissible and validates manhood an exclusively ancient notion that has since disappeared. From Modern Greece all the way to Pakistan we (or rather a more worldly observer than some of us) can clearly see such mentalities and practices going on.
You have odd ideas about how words and language work, but I doubt you’re interested in learning better, so I won’t bother trying to educate you.
It seems a relevant distinction between Sappho and Achilles as namesakes that; a) the historicity of Sappho is AFAIK not seriously disputed; and b) the texts from which relevant inferences (still possibly inaccurate, of course) are drawn about Sappho are generally believed to have been authored by her.
I note that a relevant wiki article gives no fewer than four examples of alleged male couples in ancient Greece, but three of the four suffer from the possible defect of lack of historicity. (Achilles/Patroclus, Theseus/Pirithous, and Orestes/Pylades).
Harmodius and Aristogeiton spring to mind. Names to toast every March 15th (though, as always, the reality was much messier than the myth.)
ἐν μύρτου κλαδὶ τὸ ξίφος φορήσω
ὥσπερ ῾Αρμόδιος καὶ ᾽Αριστογείτων.
ὅτε τὸν τύραννον κτανέτην
ἰσονόμους τ᾽ ᾽Αθήνας ἐποιησάτην.
the texts from which relevant inferences (still possibly inaccurate, of course) are drawn about Sappho are generally believed to have been authored by her.
Yes, but the idea that poems directly reflect the beliefs and experience of the poet is a childish one. Did Archilochus really throw away his shield in battle? Who knows? Who cares?
I suspect that the people who argue Achilles was “problematic” (fide Sarah) mean that he was distinguished only for killing, was greedy for a sex-slave, sulked with fatal consequences, and carried his revenge unpleasantly far.
ETA: Also that not only is Achilles’ existence problematic in an earlier sense, so is his sexual orientation.
@Lars Mathiesen
The gender/sex distinction is pseudoscientific. I suffered reading Agustin Fuentes’ latest extremely garrulous book to convince myself otherwise and it didn’t work. There is variation and deviancy in the biological and psychological characteristics associated with sex. And that’s all. The fact that some people have polydactyly doesn’t mean that the number of digits in humans isn’t fixed but runs a spectrum instead.
There was a term ‘androgynes’ which referred to male homosexuals, but it could be used today for a trans woman. And there was an inverse term gynecaner which meant the same. But it could be employed today to designate a trans man. Of course trans ideology would find such terms wrong and insulting.
@JF:
True enough. I don’t think Achilles makes a great role model for anyone, regardless of sexuality. I suspect his nomination arises from an inability to name all that many other ancient Greeks. Or Romans.* Parallel to the tendency of modern scientists to mangle their ostensibly-Greek-based neologisms, really.
Proust, incidentally, has a good passage somewhere on the difference between modern conceptions of homosexuality (perhaps not so much the Baron de Charlus’ views, which are perhaps just a little idiosyncratic, and seem to owe a considerable amount to wishful thinking) and classical Greek ideas on the matter. Proust was well aware of how culture-bound our ideas on sexuality are.
* Along with a lack of awareness of just how many of the characters they have heard of are in fact known to have had same-sex lovers. Amazingly, most famous Greeks and Romans were famous for other things than their sexual habits. This does not, in fact, mean that their habits were in accord with far-right “family values.”
I don’t believe Charles Jaeger exists. I read some tedious verbiage arguing otherwise, and I am less convinced than ever of its existence. Of course, Jaeger ideology would find this disrespectful and insulting.
Surname shortened from Jägermeister, no doubt.
“Göring-Schnaps.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4germeister
The logo/label immediately made me think of Eusa from that tour de force of a novel Riddley Walker, and I see that the reference is indeed to St Eustace.
According to Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the idea that Sappho/Ksappho was a tribas originated with Horace, Ovid and their commentators.
Re “greedy for a sex slave,” the whole Briseis thing seems an awkwardness for theories trying to fit A. into subsequent identity categories. Obv. you can always claim that a historical figure now claimed to have Really Been Gay was just going through the motions in order to comply with heteronormative social expectations etc. But what’s the textual evidence that A. was doing the bare minimum and nothing more w/r/t B.?
Note also the following perhaps-unintentionally-hilarious sentences from wikipedia:
“Writers that assumed a pederastic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, such as Plato and Aeschylus, were then faced with a problem of deciding who must be more active and play the role of the erastes. When classical writers labeled their roles, they mostly characterized Achilles as the erastes and Patroclus as the eromenos, although Plato notably flips this characterization. The pair didn’t neatly fit into expected pederasty roles, and pederasty may not have been a common institution at the time the Iliad was written, making this a subject of debate.”
In other words, trying to shoehorn characters from ancient texts into present-day identity categories is nothing new, but has been going on for 24 centuries or so with the characters in question.
@ulr:
That would actually make sense. Roman and Greek attitudes to sex were by no means identical, and I can well imagine Romans of that era leaping to conclusions about Sappho from a mixture of cultural misunderstanding (and half a millennium of time difference) and the ever-popular attempt to discover the lives of authors everywhere in their works, especially in cases where we have virtually no actual biographical facts to go on.
(I’m by no means hostile to the notion that Sappho actually was – more or less – what we moderns mean by “a lesbian.” And if people who identify as lesbians want to claim her, I admire their taste. But in reality, the evidence is just not there either way, and the very use of such a label is as misguided as describing Cicero as a “whig”, or Sulla as a “Tory.”)
Exactly right.
Ah, but you misunderstand. The homosexuals who were not “effeminate” were just called… normal, unremarkable men.
What makes Achilles inappropriate here is that he was into women, too.
While I’m at it… bi- and/or pansexuality are so common I’ve met people who didn’t know hetero- and homo- weren’t just theoretical endpoints of the not-actually-Kinsey scale.
Well. Many writers (of poetry and prose) have dramatized their autobiographies, written they did things they really didn’t but wished they had, exaggerated for all sorts of effects, and so on; but the only one known to me who made up random shit about himself was Ephraim Kishon. (“And then I died.” “I stopped swimming and drowned.” “Sometimes I wonder why I actually invented him” – the slightly annoying friend he’s been talking to for the whole story. Sort of the opposite of Muse Abuse.)
The number of digits, though, is
digitalan integer. The number of sexes… not so much. You’re aware of intersex people, I trust? Of ambiguous genitalia?Ha, I didn’t even know! But it’s logical.
(The cocktails are hilarious, BTW.)
Plenty of steamy homoeroticism in Shakespeare’s sonnets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_of_William_Shakespeare#Possible_attraction_to_men
Forget “Achillean.” The word we want is Shakespearean.
Many writers (of poetry and prose) have dramatized their autobiographies, written they did things they really didn’t but wished they had, exaggerated for all sorts of effects, and so on; but the only one known to me who made up random shit about himself was Ephraim Kishon.
It’s not a matter of making up “random shit” (whatever that means), it’s a matter of having been in battle and having experienced terror and the desire to get the hell out, and thinking of how somebody who actually ran away might feel and writing a poem (or whatever) about it. Do you seriously think all writers write only about stuff they’ve actually experienced in person? That’s not how it works.
I’m reminded of the Author’s Note at the beginning of Brideshead Revisited:
“I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they.”
(Googling this to check I’d got the wording right, I discovered that a surprising number of people have interpreted this to mean that Waugh is telling us that the novel is a straightforward roman à clef, pretty much the exact opposite of what it’s plainly meant to convey. I feel that such people should be gently discouraged from attempting to read Waugh. Or anything, really.)
Krafft-Ebing hisownself seems to have been the originator of the term “homosexual”
Krafft-Ebing popularized it, but the word was coined almost 20 years earlier:
(The same history is also outlined in the OED’s etymological notes for homosexual, revised 2018.)
Oh no, not at all. I’m trying to say very few write themselves as having done things that are completely out of character for them.
Thanks, kt. Interesting that the term was from the start tied up with the push toward decriminalisation, though that makes sense once you start thinking about it.
The medicalisation is rebarbative now, but medical diagnosis absolves from moral blame.
I’m trying to say very few write themselves as having done things that are completely out of character for them.
But Archilochus wasn’t “writing himself,” he was writing a poem in the first person. I hope the difference is obvious.
Indeed, Browning was never an Italian duke who had his wife killed, J. R. R. Tolkien did not have access to a copy of a very old manuscript written by very short people, and Oscar Hammerstein II was never a girl who couldn’t say no.
On the other hand, though we don’t know anything about Sappho for sure, if there were a way to settle whether she was sexually attracted to women, I’d bet yes.
@jf
Remind me to make bets with you on the results of matches that have already finished 😊.
The Alexandrian scholars who collected, edited and catalogued Sappho’s works can’t have failed to see the homoeroticism of many of her poems so it’s doubtful that the idea originated with Latin poets. The homoeroticism in her poems must be the main reason why only an estimated 7% of her work has survived. As mores had became stricter by the early Middle Ages, scribes refused to copy them.
@David There are differences/disorders in sexual development (DSD) which can lead to all sorts of anatomical or genetic quirks associated with intersex people. Trans activism points to those rare disorders as evidence that the sex binary is biologically wrong. The problem with this idea is that only a minority of individuals with gender dysphoria have any form of DSD. And this argument also confuses deviation from the norm with categorical difference. Autistic people for example represent a deviation from the norm of how the brain works. But they don’t represent a ‘different way’ of being human. They represent a special-needs category, a disorder, a ‘problem’ in the Darwinian sense. If a physical or psychological trait can be observed to confer a reproductive disadvantage, it’s objectively speaking a disorder. Trans people definitely exist and their feelings of gender dysphoria are what they are. But the existence of those feelings does not constitute evidence that there are more than two sexes. They constitute evidence of a disorder. In the case of trans women, it could be autogynephilia in some cases.
The homoeroticism in her poems must be the main reason why only an estimated 7% of her work has survived.
You must be kidding. Is that why only 3-5% of Ancient Greek texts has survived, because all the rest were homoerotic? By that measure, Sappho must be substantially more hetero than average.
Trans activism [bla bla bla]
You don’t actually know any trans people, do you?
@pp: Happy to, if you let me choose which side of the bet to take as I did above.
Are you suggesting that I should have written something like, “if there were a way to settle whether she was sexually attracted to women, and the results were going to be announced soon, I’d bet yes”?
I guess I don’t understand why it matters whether Sappho was sexually attracted to women. I can see why it’s an attractive idea to lesbians (yay, a famous foremother!), but even there, would it make one somehow less comfortable in one’s lesbian skin if she had never existed? And the same goes for Shakespeare: yeah, he was probably sexually attracted to (some) men (at some time in his life), as has been the case for many men (rigid division into “homosexual” and “heterosexual” being an idiotic modern myth), but again, what difference does it make? People are way too impressed by fame.
Ksappho
Psappho, I believe (the Attic form).
Previously at Language Hat: extensive discussion of the name of Psappho starts here.
See in particular my extensive excerpt from Nagy’s 2016 paper “A Poetics of Sisterly Affect in the Brothers Song and in Other Songs of Sappho” here.
@LH: Never underestimate how much people like to have their personalities and actions validated by other people, especially famous people, being and doing the same. It’s part and parcel of men being a social animal.
Oh, I know, but the older I get the sillier I find it. Live your lives, people! Ignore the rich and famous! Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last influencer.
Harsh. Harsh; but fair.
@jf
On the other hand, though we don’t know anything about Sappho for sure, if there were a way to settle [the question of] whether [or not] she was sexually attracted to women , I’d bet [the answer would be] yes.
You are right, it is more words this way.
“I guess I don’t understand why it matters whether Sappho was sexually attracted to women. […] People are way too impressed by fame.
In my case it doesn’t matter that much and fame isn’t involved. In any kind of interaction of another person, I’m trying, mostly unconsciously, to get an idea of what the person is like. That includes the very distant interaction of reading someone’s writing.
In reading literature, that’s only a small part of my reaction, but I’ll still notice clues. I don’t assume that every “I” in a poem is a possibly distorted image of the author* or that the picture I get from that very indirect evidence is accurate, but a fragmentary and blurry picture forms nonetheless. In the case of Sappho, I knew the etymologies of “lesbian” and “Sapphic love” when I first read poems of hers in translation, so I was “primed”. (“Biased” is such a harsh word.) Edit: I don’t think questions of autobiographical, even sexual-orientational accuracy are important to reading her poems, but when the subject came up, I had a comment.
I’ve been coming up against such things in translating Machado, a poet so autobiographical that he said a poem that could not possibly have been about him was about him… but I still have to avoid assuming that his poems contain autobiographical data.
*A much-discerning Public hold
The Singer generally sings
Of personal and private things
And prints and sells his past for gold.
Whatever I may here disclaim,
The very clever folk I sing to
Will most indubitably cling to
Their pet delusion, just the same.
—Kipling, “La Nuit Blanche”
but the only one known to me who made up random shit about himself was Ephraim Kishon.
But did Kishon make it up or did Friedrich Torberg? Didn’t Torberg make „free“ translations?
@Vanya
https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/3-2019/5791
The main alterations of Kishon’s Hebrew texts for his German publishers seem to be cuts and not additions, i.e.,things too specific to Israeli circumstances and especially (1) criticism of the Israeli left (including its foreign supporters, notably Jewish ones) or (2) denigration of Palestinians are excised. Torberg (and Brod who adapted an earlier (serious?) play by Kishon for a performance in Braunschweig) no doubt gave the texts a more elegant or polished Austro-Hungarian conversational tone, but they would probably say that they were working within the author’s intentions (Kishon had an excellent relationship with Torberg). I see no reason to think Torberg would have added extra material, unless this had been added to the English translations he was using as a primary source.
@languagehat You know how much of Plato’s works have survived? 100% or very nearly that. You know how much of the works of the sophists (Plato’s opponents) has survived? Basically nothing. It would be irrational to suggest that this dramatic imbalance in the survival rate has nothing to do with the preferences and value-judgements of posterity. Plato believed in metaphysical certainties. His opponents believed in relativism. Are you surprised that the Christian Middle Ages chose to invest their energy in copying Plato and not the sophists?
The reason so many ancient works were lost is first, because not all works were seen as worthy enough to transmit to posterity and second, because the Greco-Roman world was fully destroyed by the 8th century, both ideologically and politically/economically. Byzantium could no longer project any serious power beyond its modest borders by this point. The preservation of cultural heritage requires tackling your survival problems first.
When the Mongols destroyed the libraries of Baghdad the last great spring source to the ancient world was dried up. The lesson: whoever values civilization and its legacy, had better do a better job than the hapless Arabs at Baghdad at cultivating the true virtues that sustain civilization and basic decency. The counter-cultural pseudo-virtues that echo in that tasteless statement about entrails can’t achieve that. The rich and famous are rich and famous for a good reason. They (or their ancestors) managed to excel in something in their lives.
Hat, I’m finding that I need to scroll down more often on this site than previously. Is there a possible technical solution?
@Charles, I don’t quite understand why you or anyone can have a problem with gender as distinct with sex.
The concept of, say, “womanhood” in a given culture is very complex. You can confidently tell that some parts of it (breasts) have to do with sex and some (dress) fully belong to culture and have nothing to do with sex. It’s difficult to say anything about other elements (but we can sutdy how Tunisian “womanhood” is different from Russian “womanhood”: such differences are likely to be, in large part, a function of culture).
Having a name for this can be convenient for someone who wants to understand it. And the idea of gender reflects reality (you aren’t thinking that desses are not real) even without a name.
A traditionalist can be annoyed, because the idea can be used both for describing reality and for changing it. But technically she too can say that two genders (distinct from sex) are greatest achievements of the humanity etc.
@LH, but that’s what Sappho is known for. How many people would read her wihtout it?
@drasvi
As I have indicated before, you occasionally express yourself a little forcefully. I just “dial it down”, but maybe you could reread and amplify occasionally before posting.
@LH, Hans, one reason communication with me (or understanding me) can be difficult for some people here is that I don’t want to be liked. Which is not my ‘normal’ state, there is a (personal) reason for it too.
I may want to be nice and polite with everyone and to be understood as well, but wanting to be liked would have made all of this easier….
I agree though, that communication is not same as “how do you feel about being attracted to women”. I’m mostly illustrating Hans’s point.
On the other hand, women attracted to women aren’t born and do not grow up among similar people. Being attracted to someone is “communication” too, and her attitude is important, and there are attitudes and expectations of other important people.
@PP, which of my thoughts do you mean?
That Sappho wouldn’t be as widely known and read?
That traditionalists can be annoyed by the idea of gender?
That…?
P.S. Or does “technically she too can say that two genders (distinct from sex) are greatest achievements of the humanity etc.” sound in English as agreement with that two genders are greatest achivements? In Russian it [its literal translation] does not sound so, but perhaps I should have written “could”.
P.P.S. Your comment could be a good illustration for what I wrote below it, but I don’t understand what you mean:(
@drasvi
I think you have clarified my concern (with “how many people..”). Without clarification, in English this comes across to me as tendentious, and almost as if you were speaking to a child or someone whose opinion you did not see any reason to value. It is clear (at least to me and considering your entire discourse) you did not intend this. If you intended something like “I believe there are readers of Sappho who read the works not because they have literary merit, but principally in order to find content resonating with their personal beliefs. I believe such readers (and those for whom the poems are prescribed readings) constitute an overwhelming proportion of the entire readership.”, then this is what I mean by amplifying (I agree my version is very verbose and you could achieve the same effect with fewer words).
@LH, but that’s what Sappho is known for. How many people would read her wihtout it?
That’s what she’s known for to many people, but it’s irrelevant to her poetry, which many people (not the same people) would read in any case because it’s some of the greatest poetry ever written.
Without clarification, in English this comes across to me as tendentious, and almost as if you were speaking to a child or someone whose opinion you did not see any reason to value.
Well put, and I hope drasvi can recognize this and recalibrate his approach accordingly. That is exactly how it often comes across, and it naturally makes people (including me) bristle. It’s not a matter of “being liked,” it’s about treating other people with respect.
@PP,
I see no reason to think Torberg would have added extra material,
Thanks, I wondered about that just given the tremendous popularity Kishon seems to enjoy in the German speaking world (Austria in particular) relative to other non-Israeli markets (including the US). I suppose it is just as likely Kishon simply had a native Austrian-Hungarian sensibility towards satire that just appeals to Central Europeans (and that possibly comes across better in German than English).
@Vanya
Thanks for suggesting the topic, I learned a lot. I am not the last word, the article I linked to has references. What I take from this is that Kishon, at least at times, thought of himself as a heavyweight who should have been taken more seriously, both within and outside Israel. Torberg on the other hand, or even possibly like Kishon, was someone whose talent for serious writing was extremely negatively affected by the war and the political developments leading up to it (compare I.B. Singer, for whom this was not the case). I think “Der Schüler Gerber” is an excellent YA-ish novel, and it was considered at the time to be very promising, but I don’t know of a later book by Torberg that has the same gripping writing (e.g., compare “Süsskind von Trimberg” with “Till” by wossisname). I think Torberg also wrote a book of anecdotes about prewar Jewish life.
@PP, hm. Thanks.
It seems the problem is not my (English) language, but I don’t understand what it is.
@LH, PP, we misunderstand each other frequently, but I don’t remember being THAT much confused.
I feel precisely as if I was told that I sound like a Donatist and I asked why and was told “because you mentioned apples” (apples and Donatists chosen randomly).
@LH, about “being liked” I meant that when you DO respect someone and want to sound so, it is easier to sound so when you also want to be liked.*
But I’m unable to change my approach because I understand nothing:((
* “I don’t give a shit what others think about me” sounds good. “Want to be liked” sounds as something that can make you dishonest. But almost all people want to be liked to some extent and it makes communication easier. Or more precisely: when you actually don’t give a shit, you find that it makes communication more difficult.
@PP,
In my circle people can say “But that’s nonsense! Because how X when Y?” and the addressee, if she’s more knowlegeable will know that the speaker knows she’s more knowlegeable and that the speaker expects either an explanation why “that” is not nonsense (the speaker made a mistake) or agreement and explanation how the speaker misunderstood her or agreement (and an explanation that the addressee made a mistake).
This style may have something to do with solving math problems: people often exclaim “I’m an idiot!” and they don’t expect belief in one’s superiority from anyone. And when I point at a mistake in your solution, either I’m mistaken or you’re mistaken.
Some other people understand “but that’s nonsense!” as “you’re stupid”.
But I didn’t say that anything LH said is nonsense:(
I asked a rhetorical question (with the tone of “who would read her”) and to you it sounds condescending and I read my question then read your explanation of what it sounds to you and I re-read my question and I read LH’s explanation of what it sounds to him and I undestand nothing because to me my question has as much to do with condescension as Donatists with people who use the word “apple”. To me it is unremarkable, completely, whenever I read it and re-read it and re-re-read it armed with your explanations.
I don’t understand you at all, the above story about “nonsense” is all I could come up with when trying to understand you… but even this story has nothing to do with what I said.
@drasvi
I cannot speak for others, for me some ways of expression in speech I hear or writing I read can trigger negative emotions in me. The same content can usually be expressed in a way that does not trigger negative emotions. I have tried to give an example. This is not about “wanting to be liked”, but about “wanting to be listened to”. I really think you do want to be listened to. How in touch are you with your own negative emotional triggers? Are you able to anticipate or recognise instances where something will trigger or has triggered a negative emotional response in you? If so, do you try to extrapolate to cases where something you say or write might have a similar effect?
As for Sappho:
I keep reading a poet and I say that I like this poet based on poetic qualities of her poetry.
But the decision to read a poet depends on a variety of factors. “Someone said something that reminded me of her”. And if I don’t know this poet, “poetic quality” can’t be one of those factors.
Perhaps my question is not even rhetorical. I don’t remember what I meant, but I think PP read it as a rhetorical question.
How many people would read her? How many people would KNOW about her? Maybe your answer is “same people” or even “MORE people”, if you think that she’s so good as a poet that she would have been more widely known and translated.
But if your answer is “many students of Greek would read her in Greek”, my Greek is not good enough to read and appreciate poetry.
@PP, could you explain what in my words made you feel what you described above?
WIthout understanding that all I can do is “replacing all short comments with longer comments” (you did give me an example. It is longer). I CAN do that, but it doesn’t make much sense.
I repeat that I don’t even remember being THAT much confused. I understand nothing. At all.
“Nothing at all” here must be understood as “nothing at all”. Not as “almost nothing at all”.
I even think that your and LH’s characteristic could work for LH’s words (which were not chosen particularly carefully). But I don’t have a problem with them. I’d say LH treats me with respect. That’s enough. And I’d say, LH didn’t take much effort to find respectful words. And… I’m comfortable with that.
PS.
“This is not about “wanting to be liked”, but about “wanting to be listened to”.”
What I said about “wanting to be liked” was a reaction to a comment by Hans and has nothing to do with what we’re talking about here.
@drasvi
I would suggest you discuss this offline (preferably F2F) with someone who is “cool” and has loads of friends and lots of patience. This would not be me 😊. I can only say, what I have tried to point out is not about content or the number of words or level of circumlocution. So if that is all you see in discourse, you are rightfully confused. What I have tried to point out is about acknowledging and recognising (potential or actual) emotional affect when engaging in conversation.
“What I have tried to point out is about acknowledging and recognising”
@PP, you KEEP thinking that I understand why and how these (unremarkable for me) words made you feel what they made you feel… and that I do NOT acknowledge and recognise what you want me to acknowledge and recognise:(
You and LH explained what exactly they made you feel.
You and LH explained why I shouldn’t make you feel so.
You tried explaining same things in another way and in this comment in a third way.
But I don’t know why these words make you feel so. I re-read them and re-re-read them and re-re-re-read them and tried very hard to imagine how and why someone may hear condescension there.
And it seems I won’t ever learn that:) I won’t look around for cool people and distract them from cool stuff with uncool questions about conversations on languagehat:( LH can ask me not to post here and I won’t.
Or someone can try to explain what I don’t understand.
Or, I’m sorry to say, nothing will change because nothing can be changed. (I appreciate your politeness, though)
I mean, really: I don’t want to ruin anyone’s mood but….it is easier not to post here at all than to chase random people on the street (I don’t have any other cool people around) with dialogues in English from languagehat.com:)
“lots of patience” – I’m solving your problem which you say I create and which I maybe don’t want to create. I am ready to invest and have invested “lots of” my patience. I’m willing to do that… when it is my patience and not someone else’s.
P.S. Or wait. I re-read your comment, maybe I was mistaken when I said “you KEEP thinking…”. Then sorry for the tone of this comment.
If so, I see nothing disagreable about your comment.
But it is worth reminding that if you are thinking that you’re investing your patience in solving my problem – which I appreciate – you must also take into account that I’m in turn is investing my patience in solving yours.
Ah. Yes.
I shouldn’t chuckle out loud at 1:46 in the morning in a house that is built like a drum. But I did. I hope I didn’t wake up the particularly sensitive neighbor right under me. (…Meanwhile it’s 2:19, and no reaction, so apparently all is good…)
I am an evolutionary biologist. Darwin’s great insight is that it is fundamentally wrong-headed to think of variation in biology as messy deviations from a norm/average/Platonic ideal/whatever. The variation is the real thing, the population. That’s what natural selection and all that jazz acts on.
I’ve read of that particularly bizarre idea. It sounds like a projection by people who don’t have a gender identity in the first place (which isn’t uncommon) and can’t imagine what one could be like.
I didn’t feel like spelling out my whole argumentation all at once as a wall of text. I prefer to establish what we agree on and don’t agree on before I invest a lot of time and effort in assumptions. Next: you know about phantom pain?
I’d rather say the assumption that nobody or almost nobody is bi-/pansexual is the idiotic modern myth here. Most people are, and it actually shows in some cultural assumptions.
That’s “gender roles”, not “gender identity”.
If you’ve always taken for granted you’re in some sense the same sort of person as all the other boys, and felt embarrassed when you’re mistaken for a girl or when you clicked the wrong box in a web form, that’s your gender identity. If you were taught to correct people when they got that wrong, but you don’t actually feel anything about it and just do it because you were taught, you don’t have a gender identity – again, that exists and is quite a bit more common than the culture assumes.
At among people who aren’t physically intersex, their gender identity usually lines up with their anatomy, but there are exceptions. And that’s where phantom pain becomes interesting.
In the case of trans women, it could be autogynephilia in some cases
This is actually a widely shared transphobic trope. I’ve encountered it myself when I was at a demonstration (about something else entirely), from some lesbian counterdemonstrators who’d been suckered into demonstrating against us by a bunch of people who don’t give a damn about anyone but cis white heterosexual men.
(We got talking together pretty amicably in the end. Lesbian counterdemonstrators are the best counterdemonstrators.)
The fashbot is recycling pretty standard far-right Twitter shit on, well, more or less everything. There is no point in attempting a discussion with such creatures. Provocation is all they’re about. Seriously, don’t feed the troll. You might as well try to discuss philosophy with ELIZA.
“it’s 2:19”
Reminded me how I and L. came to A’s place in midnight and he entertained me and L. with LOUD punk-rock from big dynamics on the floor. Occasionaly someone, frustrated with the music, knocked at the heating radiator. It is customary here to express one’s annoyment by knocking at it with something heavy: steel pipes run through the entire building from top to bottom and everyone can hear the sound. A. reacted by reducing the volume to half-loud… for a few minutes (I don’t understand his logic).
Around 3 I went to the toilet and heard Heavy Steps outside, from the floor below and up the stairs. I couldn’t see or hear that from the toilet, but A. heard them too and within a few seconds managed to turn off the music and the light, to turn the sofa into a bed, put L. in it and a blanket on L. and to undress. When the steps reached the door, with a sleepy look he went to meet the visitor. It was a man. With an axe. The man said:
Это вы…
…стучали…
…по батарее?
“What? No, I didn’t” said A. and pointed towards the flat above his. The man thanked him and went up the stairs.
Great story 🙂
I hope it didn’t end up with an actual axe murder?
@David (the one that isn’t so flamboyantly anti-social)
Sure, variation is the real thing in nature but nature also needs a dominant standard to innovate off of. For example, before white skin evolved in some high-latitude regions, dark skin was the norm in those places. White skin conferred an evolutionary advantage in those regions and the norm gradually changed. And there are variations that don’t help the individual that has them. Living with gender dysphoria is an obstacle when it comes to enjoying life and/or passing on your genes. Having thalassemia is an obstacle. Having schizophrenia is an obstacle.
Humans usually have ten fingers. Some people are born with less and some with more. Is it fair to say that 10 fingers is the standard/norm/platonic ideal? Or is it unfair because we are (allegedly) pretending that people with less or more fingers don’t exist?
Platonic ideals arguably exist in a certain sense. If they don’t how come the sperm donor Jonathan Jacob Meijer managed to father so many children across all continents? He was chosen over other donors because of his appearance. He is a tall, blonde Germanic-looking male and this is the donor that women chose. So the current Platonic ideal of male beauty among the world’s women is basically the Nazi ideal (*shrugs shoulders).
So you’re saying that there is a number of people that regardless of their anatomy, simply lack a gender identity. You ask them what they are and the answer is ‘meh, whatever, I don’t know’. Sure, that is true and it’s probably more common than thought. And this is also evidence of a mental condition whose mechanisms are at present poorly understood.
Yes, I know what phantom pain is. Are you suggesting that the queer equivalent to that is the feeling of ‘having been born in the wrong body’?
I think that most people indeed are capable of bisexual behavior. But individuals that feel drawn to both sexes in roughly equal measure aren’t common among bisexuals. Why? The world’s most famous bisexual is Zachary Zane. But once you read his book and his susbtack stories it’s pretty obvious that he’s more drawn to males. He has sex with them far more often.
The whole stereotype that bi women=basically straight but a threesome is fun too and bi men=basically gay but women are cute too is not wholly accurate but it isn’t as inaccurate as ‘progressives’ would think. Cis bisexual males are the most sexually alluring demographic. They command the most sexual attention across all other sexual and gender demographics with three obvious exceptions 1. lesbians which are in both percentage and absolute terms rarer than their male homosexual counterparts (I wonder why by the way) and also less promiscuous, 2. trans men which are rarer than their women counterparts (I also wonder why) and 3. asexuals which are extremely rare, though I wonder to what degree. Are they rarer than intersex people?
@drasvi
Great anecdote!
Here is another attempt to respond to your posts directed at me. I will write a short post to you with warnings in square brackets [].
—
I hope you slept well, you were up very early this morning [Ensure this does not sound sarcastic]. I regret that you feel you have no “cool” friends that can help you understand [“you feel” is good, but still more will be needed to ensure this will not be perceived as patronising or insulting]. You seem quite gregarious and social [this should be sufficient, although maybe replace “quite” by “rather” or “very” to avoid any hint of sarcasm]. I am sorry for taking the phrase “not wanting to be liked” out of context, I must have conflated several posts in my head [apology is good, but one must lay blame squarely on oneself, even if one feels there is a shared fault. In this case, wait for reciprocity].
—
Maybe you could write posts, even when these are purported to be “objective”, with these warning brackets first, then delete them when you are happy you will be understood as intended.
That’s “gender roles”, not “gender identity”…. their gender identity usually lines up with their anatomy
I don’t actually understand where a gender identity could come from besides comparison of one’s own physical characteristics with those of others or introspection about how one’s nature fits into the gender roles prevalent in one’s milieu. Not suggesting either of those would need to be conscious, mind.
There’s a third possibility: what one is told, starting with one’s parents, and how one is treated. That doesn’t change what you’re saying, though.
@pp: On the other hand, though we don’t know anything about Sappho for sure, if there were a way to settle [the question of] whether [or not] she was sexually attracted to women , I’d bet [the answer would be] yes.
You are right, it is more words this way.
Hm. I’ll have to take your word that “the question of” and “or not” would make it clearer or otherwise better in your view. I’ve been known to flout the style writers’ advice and say “whether or not”, and I can’t give a principle by which I decide to add “or not” [or not], but I don’t see it here. I did consider options such as “I’d bet on ‘Yes’,” and I can see that might be better.
Maybe the point of DM’s phantom pain analogy is to suggest that, apart from category-building, we also have some kind of gender proprioception (as it were)? I can easily enough imagine sex proprioception existing independently of higher cognitive functions like categorization, in some way that would hardly be accessible to conscious awareness; gender as distinct from sex, not so much.
According to a non-binary friend, that should be “most of us have some kind of gender proprioception”.
@jf
I think the problem is that my “ambiguity filter” does not function well, so without the kind of parallelism (question/answer) I sketched, I read
If this were settled, I would bet [BET ON RACE AFTER RESULT ANNOUNCED-NOK]
instead of, or, in addition to your version 25/09:9.54,
If this were settled [but you and I had not heard the result], I would bet [BET ON RACE BEFORE RESULT ANNOUNCED–OK]
The point about whether vs. whether or not for me is again about holding too much ambiguity; I don’t know whether means whether or not, or another (or even more than one) hypothesis is going to be raised after the one following the whether. I agree that this may be more a problem with addressing readers like me with “special needs”, not an average reader.
@DM, Charles spoke about “gender” and “sex” and I thought he is objecting to the distinction.
Among your two illustrations:
– one works for many things other than gender: a Russian man believes he’s similar to you (as a man) and to a Russian woman (as a Russian), differing from her as a man.
That he isn’t as similar to a hunter-gatherer. That he isn’t as similar to a baby.
– one (embarrassment) depends on many things, some not very interesting: Russian men are told that it’s a shame to behave like a woman.
When I was 20 I was a bit embarrassed when I was mistaken for a Jew. I was walking through a small crowd of attendees of the Moscow synagogue and the guy praised my hat. I note that I’m not a Jew when the hat was on his head. The reason for being a bit embarrassed was that I was not sure he is not embarrassed.
(Of course I heard about the model where Jewishness is a gender:))
Not unike my ex-wife: she like Muslim-style headscarves and thought about wearing one in an Arab Muslim country, but she isn’t a Muslim, she is indifferent to religion and she doesn’t understand what is it (religion). She wasn’t sure it is respectful to locals to put on hijab, given what it signifies for Muslims (for some of them, I’d say). Of course locals told that it is respectful, but… I think she’s not sure.
But gender is interestingly distinct from my religious and hunter-gatherer examples. Particularly:
– sex. sex and sex, male or female and love.
A “woman” (the gender) is her breasts and her dress (and make-up and many things). Not “her dress” without breasts.
– distribution. Hunter-gatherers are…. somewhere. You’re in Germany. But men and women mix (one m to one f) and form couples.
Interestingly, in an idealised traditional Arab culture the distribution is somewhat different: male and female halves of the house, marriages to several women. Even in a Europeanised country and even even without restrictions as in Afghanistan women don’t go to some places (coffee houses).
They also don’t go to some other places where they don’t go in Russia either.
(The distribution of babies is similar to that of men and women rather than to that of Russians and Germans)
Are women (Russian and Arab ones) professional Peters Pans?
Personally, especially since there are some gay, trans, and non-binary people present (and nice ones at that), I would not feel right discussing their psychology here in the abstract third person.
Quite so. Well said.
Personally, I prefer to feed the trolls till they explode. I do understand if people prefer to avoid the splatter, though.
Amusing.
Sometimes. Some trans men – by no means all, but some – report having a phantom penis, and some trans women – again, some – report having phantom breasts. Phantom pain is when the brain’s map of the body isn’t accurate anymore. Possibly, being trans is – among other things – when the brain’s map of the body never was accurate in the first place.
(One probably easy way for that to happen, BTW, is microchimerism.)
The only known treatment for gender dysphoria is to adapt the territory to the map, as it were. It works – all the depression & stuff is drastically reduced if you let people be what they’ve felt they are for so long.
Ah. Never heard of him.
But yes, exactly 50 : 50 preferences are not very common; I don’t know if they’re more common than 100 : 0 or than any other such precise number.
I trust you have statistics.
Same. But if these claims really are true on the surface (from my limited experience they may not be), potential cultural reasons for underreporting come to mind immediately (in the West writ large): women are expected to have very close friendships with each other and to be capable of finding each other beautiful, while if men do that, “that’s gay”; promiscuous men are to some extent admired (“sexual prowess”, “notches on bedposts” etc. etc.), promiscuous women are “sluts”; it is nowadays accepted if you’re a rather extreme tomboy, so “a woman” can pretty much live “as a man” without even thinking a lot about it, but we’re still far from the opposite.
They’re clustered on certain websites… probably much more common than widely thought, because this is yet another condition that simply wasn’t expected to exist. I’ve seen guesstimates of at least 1% of the population…
Some (well, most) people are fine with that, and some think “yeah, random nonsense, whatever” when they’re 5 years old or younger…
Do you mean that patriarchal cultures have a tendency to conflate “male” with “adult”? That occurs, yes…
Personally, I prefer to feed the trolls till they explode. I do understand if people prefer to avoid the splatter, though.
Yeah, but the rest of us would prefer that he be ignored. His ramblings aren’t only visible to you, and the rest of us are forced to scroll down while holding our breath.
J.W. Brewer: “Eventually, the only thing that was transparent rather than opaque was that Uranian evokes Uranus, which has unfortunate homophones.”
Eventually, maybe, but not in the 1880s: as discussed at The History of Uranus Jokes, the planet did not yet generally have the unfortunate pronunciation.
“Uranian” was modeled on the German Urning, which also got some use in English as a direct loanword, but to me that also sounds unfortunate — like a race of miniature people living in urns!
I prefer to feed the trolls till they explode
Crescit appetitus alendo.
@DM, yes, but not in your formulation which makes me think of two (disagreable) things:
1. (a) active agency (“conflate”) and specifically (b) male agency.
2. that being like a man is somehow better than being like a child.
That is, if distance W[oman]-to-C[hild] is 1 and M[an]-to-C is 3, the ideal is W-to-С 3 rather M-to-C 1.
I say “Arab and Russian” because I don’t know much about most cultures. I’m even not very confident about, say, France (what French childhood and french manhood and womanhood are?). What to say about Africa?
I mean… Once a traveller in Russia (and a Russian learner) told she was perplexed by pairs of girls hand in hand on Russian streets. Not uncommon sight indeed. She thought at first that the gesture is romantic or sexual (it is not) and asked why do they do it (they do it because why not?)
Better ask why a Russian schoolgirl needs another schoolgirl to go to the toilet!
Numerous gestrues and expressions of (warm) emotions are
– inacceptable between two men or boys
– partly acceptable between a man and a boy
– acceptable between a woman or a girl and anyone
– especially frequent with children
Men are dryer with each other. You wrote about that above.
And many other things. Baby-talk in female genderlect.
E.g. an unmarried Arab woman is ideally economically a child, I think. (the ideal is not necessarily maintained, there are poor working girls and girls who are 30 and haven’t found a husband).
And in Russian university girls study, while boys work and pretend to study. Still I can’t explain the salary offered to (female) seller in a Tunisian shop (not enough to buy (humble) food) in any way other than “there are girls who need pocket money” (and ready to seriously work for them) so the Arab world is somewhat different.
I think I wrote about me and the Butt?
When I was 4 I was disgusted by baby-talk.
And among many elements of bt, the word pópa, “butt”. Which is a problem, because HOW then I should refer to it?
zhópa – rude, taboo.
zad – literary, heavy, mildly rude.
zádnitsa – markedly colloquial, mild taboo when I was a child, mildly rude
Which one should I choose? I thought a lot about it in elementary school. I decided (sic) I’ll go diglossic, use zad and zadnitsa depending on context. (The result was that I didn’t use zad, either because I didn’t like it or because I didn’t speak about the Arse in H-contexts, and I saw that I’m a zadnitsa-user rather than diglossic:))
But when I was 16 boys and girls developed interest to butts… Er. “It isn’t what you think!”, you don’t have to speak about Butts when you’re looking at one and admiring it.
But when you’re 16, you talk about butts with girls.
And it turned out they use my personal taboo word, pópa. And what they wear on their pópa is not trusý (a word which sounds funny to children: it is similar to trúsy “covards”… and is not similar to anything else. Other than the verb trusít’ and more frequent adverb trustsoj [about jogging, from a deverbal noun]) but diminutive and very, very, very childish trúsiki “panties”! (makes sense, given that they’re narrow or laced).
Girls don’t develop disgust to baby talk. Didn’t develop it when they were 4.
…I came to love zhópa as an adult.
@Y, well, I’m speaking about womanhood and manhood and Arabs and Russians. In the third person because how else?
I don’t like the idea that people must learn about the world from media and textbooks. I think we need to talk if we want to make the world more comfortable. When I am X and people around me who are not X are talking about X I can be both displeased, pleased or entertained, depending on how and what people say.
(But maybe something bothers you about this “how and what” or about what you expect from Charles)
But I see that for any X your approach (the way you formulate it) means giving voice to X. What bothers me is that it also a form of marginalisation of X (because I normally try to treat any X, marginalised or not, as I treat men who wear hats, that’s like I treat women who don’t wear hat with recognition that they need hatstands).
Men who wear hats are exotic. That hat (the one the synagogue attendee liked) was a beutiful hat. It wasn’t “unusual”, it looked precisely how I imagine a hat, but elegant and looked good on me. It earned me the nickname Shalyápin among local kids. (Shalyápin sounds similar to shlyápa)
Men who wear hats are exotic
Are you implying that you yourself don’t wear a hat?
How do you keep your head warm while commenting?
A link to one of my selfies to give you an idea of the dress code for this site:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Garibaldi_%281866%29.jpg
(The stick is optional. The hat, of course, is mandatory.)
Alternatively this rugby fan’s hat. Maybe not suitable for a synagogue, though.
https://www.dreamstime.com/fan-south-africa-national-rugby-union-team-wears-interesting-hat-symbols-image261185298
Oh, that’s not limited to Russia 🙂
But yeah, all your examples are cultural (and to varying degrees much more widespread) or subject to individual variation (the age when attitudes to baby talk change, and how they change) that is itself constrained by culture.
So far, the sensitive part of my hat isn’t on top. It’s the ears.
I have often wondered whether Mole’s bust of Garibaldi included the hat.
@PP:
That one evidently even incorporates its own wifi.
@DE, no, I wouldn’t say so. I don’t think I can’t be exotic.
But I haven’t put it on for years. I wear a hat when I come across one that looks exceptionally good on my head. But i’m no sufficiently careful with them, I can even sleep in one, in the forest.
Perhaps same is true for grass skirts but I didn’t come across a grass skirt that looks exceptionally good on my arse.
Not all of us have the knees for it, it’s true.
The Scottish method is to wear a dagger in your garter to draw the observer’s eye away from your cellulite. Works well.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Scottish_Stag_Antler_Sgian_Dubh.jpg
> I suspect that the people who argue Achilles was “problematic” (fide Sarah) mean that he was distinguished only for killing, was greedy for a sex-slave, sulked with fatal consequences, and carried his revenge unpleasantly far.
Mostly the second one, as far as i remember. The word “rapist” was definitely used. They seemed to think that Achilles was “especially bad” compared to other mythological figures but didnt explain why. I’m rusty on Greek mythology but I dont really see it.
Anyways, the thread here was far more interesting, thanks everyone! I appreciate the suggestion of Pelopidasian and discussion of past coinages. I had never heard of Uranian/Urning/etc before, will enjoy looking more into that. And I’m still reading through those threads about the history of Uranus pronunciations and the meanings/spellings of (P)Sappho 😛
Well, given that “greedy” means “not willing to share her”…
Maybe I should have said “selfish”, or maybe it’s just the rape part of it, as Sarah said.
I think the unfortunate Briseis is treated as a status symbol in the quarrel rather than primarily as a sex object. No doubt there were plenty of other prisoners to rape, if that had been the main issue for the ghastly protagonists.
Speaking of early appearances of “homosexual”, Fred Shapiro has just posted on ADS-L with an antedating of the earliest publicly printed use in English: it (and “homosexuality”) appeared in American newspapers reporting on the murder trial of Alice Mitchell in the spring and summer of 1892, some months before the English translation of Krafft-Ebing came out.
(My own infinitesimal contribution to the OED’s etymology was pointing out their typo Pyschopathia Sexualis, since corrected.)
Ah, I just noticed that rozele already mentioned the word “urning” a couple weeks ago. rozele knows this kind of thing.
Havelock Ellis had some prescriptive advice:
Apart from anything else, “urning” is too reminiscent of “gurning.” Nobody should be gurning about sex. Unless that’s their thing, I suppose.
“Gurning” is likely to need explanation for Americans. Previously at Language Hat: So Happy He Gurns.
BTW, that was the first -ing-in since the 17th century. Somehow, -ing has become a “closing suffix” that cannot be followed by any other suffixes – except the -s- that makes compound nouns.
All the nouns in this terminology sound awkward and esoteric. That’s probably a major factor in why none of them survived (more important than their close fit to one particular theory – some could have been reinterpreted as, say, “lesbian” or “trans man” or whatever and survived that way, but this didn’t happen).
Is it too late to suggest “gurning and gurning in the widening tyre”?
Gave me a laugh!
@Jerry, “greedy” is fine (who can think of a better word for a man who does not want to give a way his woman to his commander?), but is he said to have raped her, anywhere?
Or is it expected, based on that he’s an Achaean warlord and she’s his slave? If so, enough to say he’s an Achaean warlord and such people are variously flawed.