@Randal'Thor eh. Like I said, the content wasn't what I would have chosen; in fact, I'm pretty sure I downvoted a third of the questions/answers in that list. But like I said in my comment, its good to hear from people's explanation of what content they like. I prefer knowing why people upvote stuff rather than people voting but being too afraid to explain why.
You have a point about not just wanting a list of the highest voted answers. But if someone believes that our best content is our highest voted content, well, then what are you going to do.
> While quick low-effort answers and super well-researched ones can both be valid in different contexts, HNQ rewards the former rather than the latter, even though I think we'd all agree that the latter is more worthy of reward.
I agree, but it isn't just the HNQ; it's also community members' voting patterns (I'm beating a dead horse here, but story-id questions inexplicably get tons of upvotes compared to other questions, while more thoughtful questions get ignored. That has nothing to do with the HNQ).
Anne Frank writes:
I have a throng of admirers who can't keep their adoring eyes off me
and who sometimes have to resort to using a broken mirror to try and
catch a glimpse of me in the classroom
So, is Anne Frank some kind of a celebrity at school?
@Dawny33 didn't downvote, but I would recommend two changes:
(1) cite the page number/webpage/chapter you got the quote from
(2) the phrase "So, is Anne Frank some kind of a celebrity at school?" doesn't sound very respectful. Maybe say something along the lines of "is this a real event, or was Anne Frank exaggerating"
Just made the edit to fix point number 2, waiting on you to provide the source of the quote to address point number one.
Warning: MASSIVE spoilers ahead. If you haven't read the last Harry Potter book, but plan to do so, turn back now
Throughout the entire Harry Potter series, there was one character who was the comic 'bad guy' - designed to be disliked. This of course is Snape.
We think that he is a Death Eat...
@Hamlet Leaving aside the point about story-ID, I agree. It's easier to understand a quick low-effort answer enough to upvote it, and some people just aren't going to bother reading through a really long and detailed one.
I found it!
The Land Beyond by Maria Gripe.
I was thinking about this book again, and went into a sort of meditative state, seeing the book's cover in my mind's eye and trying to recall the title. It wasn't quite "The Lost World" ... but maybe something similar? Eventually the phrase "The Land ...
I've been reading the poem "A German Requiem" https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-german-requiem/, and found a few lines hard to understand. Below are my questions.
1. What is the connection between the last two lines from the first stanza? I think there must be some connection between the tw...
In Act III Scene 2 of Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare,
Portia : One half of me is yours, the other half yours. Mine own, I would say; but if mine
then yours.
Roughly translated it means
One half of me is yours, and the other half—my own half, I’d call it—belongs to yo...
@Randal'Thor (Language stuff.) We were just talking about this a few days ago. I stated that articles in English are easy for me, because articles, especially definite articles, are used almost the same in English than in Hungarian. To which another person, a native English speaker who has been learning Hungarian for a year or too, said that no, they're not used the same, and it's difficult. (I'm not convinced.)
@MartinEnder HAHAHAHA! I'll believe it when I see it.
(later discussion there clears that up)
Oh, as for translations! Good news: the library just got Lowry's Giver tetralogy in original. Finally I'll be able to read the last two books without the mediocre quality translations. Though I think even the originals don't really live up to The Giver.
The Giver deliberately ends ambiguously, which is something Lowry has confirmed. She should probably never have written sequels.
Should I have said this in Mos instead? Meh, whatever.
@b_jonas better than translations to other languages with fewer speakers, not better than the original, in case that was the confusion. or have you made the experience that other languages get better translations?
There were lots of streets and other stuff named of the socialist hero figures (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin) back before '90.
@MartinEnder I don't really have an experience, because I rarely read translations to other languages, I'm just biased and dismissingly skeptical about English translations being good.
I think it depends on the era when it was dubbed, or possibly the genre too. Of course, some of that might be nostalgy for the good old days with proper dubs, but still.
These days there are more TV stations and more content to dub, so no wonder the quality falls.
It seems that Earth has very little trouble placing its people into extremely high positions all over in a variety of countries and societies, despite not having mind control technology - or for that matter, much of any useful technology for infiltration (they can't spy remotely, for example, req...
At the end of The Giver, Jonas and Gabe head down through the snow to a place where there is music.
Downward, downward, faster and faster. Suddenly he was aware with certainty and joy that below, ahead, they were waiting for him; and they were waiting, too, for the baby. For the first time, ...
In The Phantom Tollbooth, basically every name has a significance/pun. For example, Dr. Dischord - his name is 'Discord' with 'chord' - implying bad sounds. Or the DYNNE, or 'din'. And Chroma, with his colors. I even managed to figure out something for King Azaz (the wordy king) - it's from A to...
@yannis Ok, but what if the question is about the oral past of the work? Like, whether some bardic poems like the Kalevala were usually performed by a single singer or two? Would you exclude that just because it wasn't written?
@Randal'Thor Just wanted to let you know I gave the South an initial read. (Led me to amend the accepted answer on The South, per the origin of "Martin Fierro"). I'll definitely be posting an answer on the South should I have something to contribute.
@Randal'Thor Aside from the political component, there seems to be a heroic element (my undergraduate focus was on warrior mythology, so there are likely some things to comment on in that regard)
@yannis (And sadly we're heading back to that illiterate time, with a really large volume of content on the internet in the form of pictures, sound, and videos, that we can't yet transcribe to text.)
Here we come a-wassailing is a traditional Christmas tune but it has almost no mention of the traditional Christmas subjects. The only one I can see in the entire version printed in Wikipedia is in a verse I've never heard before myself:
Bring us out a table
And spread it with a cloth;
Br...
In The Long Earth, when the bomb was about to go off in Datum Madison, people were fleeing by means of stepping.
And the stepping began.
Parents carried their children, and went back for their own old folk, and their elderly neighbours. In care homes, some bewildered senior citizens had ...
In The Phantom Tollbooth, basically every name has a significance/pun. For example, Dr. Dischord - his name is 'Discord' with 'chord' - implying bad sounds. Or the DYNNE, or 'din'. And Chroma, with his colors. I even managed to figure out something for King Azaz (the wordy king) - it's from A to...
When Bassanio is about to make his choice of the three caskets at Belmont - a choice upon which rests his chances of marriage to Portia - she calls for music and singing while he ponders.
Music, whilst BASSANIO comments on the caskets to himself
SONG.
Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or ...
@Randal'Thor No way. The most Christmassy plant is spruce pine, which we cut, bring into the room, decorate by hanging stuff on it, and call it a Christmas tree.
@Emrakul: I'm just saying I don't understand why it would be unusual for oral traditions to die without having them written up. We know about a lot of such things because they're referenced by oral traditions that did survive, and there's probably much more we just don't know about.
But maybe you were talking about some special case where that doesn't apply.
user61230
Most oral traditions came and went prior to the introduction of the written medium. That aside, so much of what comprises oral tradition isn't a part of the words of the story.
Partially. But also because the words are one fraction of the components of oral tradition.
user61230
A transcription loses a massive amount of information, and sharply recolors the experience of retelling.
user61230
(There's also some bias. We don't know what we don't know. The scope of oral tradition that died before transcription is something we can at most brush up against, but never truly grasp.)
Yeah, our society has a very hard time understanding what oral tradition really "looks" like because it falls outside our epistemology.
A lot of the things we take for granted as "true" about the spoken word and humanity's ability to use it are simply not true in societies with strong oral traditions.
@Emrakul Yep. There's a few info about lost parts that suggests us how vast it is, like when the remaining compiled text of Beowulf mentions some heroes as if it was assuming that the listeners already know them from other songs, or when the song collectors of the 20s century meet singers who tell that their dead grandfather was a much better bard who knew a hundred times as many songs as he can sing.
user61230
((I also just came back from a three day long LARP in which the death of a culture and oral tradition played a significant role in the story we told, which is maybe coloring my reply.))
Beowulf is also an easy example to draw on because it was similar enough to our culture that our academics bothered to preserve it. So much culture deemed too dissimilar has been crushed and/or ignored over the centuries.
In Act III Scene 2 of The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare,
Portia : One half of me is yours, the other half yours. Mine own, I would say; but if mine then yours.
Roughly translated it means "One half of me is yours, and the other half—my own half, I’d call it—belongs to you too. ...
@Bookworm @DVK rushed in and ended the 8-days-without-book-challenge-question streak!
@b_jonas Terran academics?
user61230
@b_jonas Our academics in the sense that our culture has selectively chosen to perpetuate Beowulf over the centuries, and has not extended the same favor to most other oral traditions.
Heck, the Chamorro culture on Guam has two completely different origin myths; one from oral tradition that seems to be the pre-Contact story, and one written down by the Spanish which is definitely not. But because one is written down, it's the only one that, until VERY recently, got taught in schools.
@Emrakul I don't think that's true. Beowulf was written down in a codex at the dawn of Christian culture in England, when there were still real bards performing it, and then it lay forgotten in the codex for like a ton of centuries, until eventually a single damaged copy was rediscovered in modern times, and it was only then when it got perpetuated in many copies.
It's not like the Homeric epics and ancient Greek dramas that were continuously so revered that scholars kept learning ancient greek so they can read them and use them as a model of literature.
user61230
Yeah, it's not always been that way. But in a sense, that demonstrates my point.
user61230
That piece of culture came inches away from being destroyed completely, because nobody bothered to care about it.
user61230
It's simply a matter of chance that it was preserved.
@Emrakul Yes, exactly. And when it got discovered, the reason why it was so valuable is not that it's a particularly good compiled bardic poem, but that it's so old we barely have any sagas contemporary with it.
Oh, you mean it's a matter of chance that it was originally written down by christian scholars? Sure, that certainly is.
So that's what you mean by "our culture", the monk from 800 years ago or something.
In conversation with Doctor Budakh - and later Arata, Rumata (Anton) basically states the Earth's - and his personal - party line about non-interference with foreign cultures:
— Что ж, — сказал он, — извольте. Я сказал бы всемогущему: «Создатель, я не знаю твоих планов, может быть, ты и не со...
There was a curious essay at some point on Russian interwebz, that asserted that Boris Strugatsky was wrong in stating (in an interview) that
and instead was supposed to be taken hostage by Don Reba. The death was an accident from under-whelming underlings sent to kidnap her, coupled with Rum...
I've been trying to find this one for several years but somehow Google-fu was weak.
Pretty old - I think I read it in early/mid 90s. Internet-published.
Apocryphal mishmash of entire Noon universe
Very specific plot detail that can serve as litmus test remains in my memory - they had some sort ...