The Reading Room

Gilles

21:01

@b_jonas In France, when sorting by family name, you're supposed to ignore the prefix de. But only when it's the French de, not when it's the Dutch/Flemish De.

b_jonas

@Gilles Oh great.

Gilles

The north of France was Flemish until the 18th century (IIRC), so there are quite a few De ___ family names there.

Just to make things interesting, some families consider their names to be French, so you can't go by etymology alone.

Rand al'Thor

@Gilles Do they then change "De" to "de"?

Gilles

@Randal'Thor That would be the only visible change

b_jonas

And there's a lot of problems cause by different customs in different cultures meeting often. For example, when you write about a person in formal register and use their name repeatedly and don't want to repeat their full names, which part should you use?

In Western context, you use the family name if they have one, or the given name if they don't have a family name (for Icelandic names, people from historic times when they didn't have family names, or for people known by their regnal name like queens and popes). But in Japanese, you'd use the given name for someone with a Japanese name. What should you use when someone only has a Japanese name and you write about them in English?

Gilles

21:05

@b_jonas it's complicated

b_jonas

And even then, you can use those customs only if you know which part of the name is which, which is why people sometimes use underlining or small caps to mark family names.

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas And in Chinese (maybe Japanese too?), the given name comes after the family name.

Just to confuse things even further.

Gilles

@Randal'Thor Japanese too, Hungarian as well

and in France in some official documents and in military speak, but not in ordinary life

Rand al'Thor

Hungarians put the family name before the given name?!

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Yes, that's another problem. For a while the normal method was to use given name first for Japanese names, but family names first in Hungarian names (because those are basically just ordinary western names written backwards). But these days, people often write Japanese names backwards in English too,.

Gilles

21:08

Yes. Of course when they're speaking English they might swap their name around.

b_jonas

For Hungarian names, the difficulty is that a significant part of people have family names that are also common male given names, and when you see the name of such a person, you can't tell whether it's backwards or forwards.

Gilles

So sometimes you have no idea which name is which: did they use their native order, or did they swap to use the international order?

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor When writing the name in Hungarian, yes. When writing it in English, it's random.

Gilles

Same problem as reading dates formatted as 01-02-03

b_jonas

But Hungarian names aren't like Japanese names. In Hungarian names, you still use the family name to refer to people in a formal context. It's just that the order is reversed.

@Gilles Exactly.

Gallifreyan

21:10

Gilles

@b_jonas family name alone, or family name with a title (like Mr or something)?

Gallifreyan

I'm clearly missing some context

b_jonas

@Gilles Usually with title, but can stand alone too.

Gilles

In France today, in most contexts, family name alone would be very rude

you can only do that if you're in a position of authority, and not in just any position of authority

b_jonas

Actually, it's with title when you address someone or write about someone closely relevant in a document with few copies, but typically without title when you write articles or textbooks about the lives of famous people.

Gilles

21:12

Army officer? Yes. Company boss? Would probably not endear you to your subordinates.

b_jonas

Yes, in most ordinary contexts, just family name is rude.

It's when you refer to famous people like "I've read Asimov's books" when it works without a title.

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas But both use the same alphabet, which can make it harder to distinguish.

Gilles

Ah, yes, same thing in France, the family name alone is widely used to refer to famous people in their absence or in the news

Rand al'Thor

Unlike Chinese and Japanese.

@Gallifreyan Sounds like Roonil Wazlib.

Gilles

but less so with women than with men, and I think it's slowly changing to be less common with men and more common with women

More serious news publications usually avoid using the last name alone

Napoleon Wilson

21:15

@Randal'Thor Did he also elaborate on the situation where there is no formatting, though?

Gallifreyan

> less common with men and more common with men

b_jonas

Also Hungarian has different name prefixes and infixes than English or French or Flemish, but that's no surprise.

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson I think he said we should either use italics or nothing at all.

Napoleon Wilson

Oh!

user61230

@Randal'Thor Yes, but if you type in something synonymous, you get that same wiki and excerpt, so it all works out.

user61230

21:17

Picking the most general name is the easiest solution, with synonyms out.

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas Infixes?

@Zyera Yes, so you should write a single wiki and excerpt that works for all the synonyms as well as the master tag name.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Hungarian names traditionally sometimes use the suffix -né after a name word taken from a husband's name to the wife's name. This can happen with either a family name or a given name, but can also sometimes be entirely missing.

English names traditionally used Mrs. to indicate that the family name comes from the husband instead.

Rand al'Thor

> An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem (an existing word). It contrasts with adfix, a rare term for an affix attached to the outside of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix.

Well, that's three new words I just learned.

I think I've got my fix now.

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor that would be consistent with what most English language academic journals do.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Well, it's technically a suffix for a word, but it can be an infix for the whole name if it's attached to a word that isn't the first one, and it often is.

The traditionally most common combinations are (1) husband's family name then husband's given name +né, (2) husband's family name +né then wife's maiden family name then wife's given name

user61230

21:21

@Randal'Thor Yep, we agree.

b_jonas

But these days there are like a hundred different possibilities for how anyone changes their name after a wedding, or what names people inherit from two parents.

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet OK, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best thing for Literature SE to do.

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor well...

I mean, I do think it's a really easy way to make our site look legitimate.

I don't think there are any particular downsides

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas As a combinatorialist, you should be able to put a better upper bound than 100 ;-)

Hamlet

And I enjoy being able to tell at a glance if, when looking for a copy of the text, I can search the title and get the book, or if I'll have to find out where the short story is published.

user61230

21:24

@Hamlet Look legitimate, to who, and under what standard?

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet When italic formatting doesn't work, and the title is a generic enough word that it'd look strange without something to set it off from the surrounding text ...

Hamlet

@Zyera following academic standards makes us look legitimate to academics and people who care what academics think.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor It really depends on how many words the husband and wife have in their name. You can more or less take any reasonable combination of the two names these days, for the family name and given names treated separately, and with multiple family names separated by spaces or hyphens but multiple given names only by spaces.

Hamlet

Oh, and this means that when people get so inspired by our site that they decide to study literature in college, they'll have less trouble transitioning to any weird formatting things.

Gilles

@Hamlet Sure, but this isn't an academic standard, it's an editorial choice made by publishers. Publishers don't all do the same thing.

Hamlet

21:26

@Gilles ?

This comes from the MLA guidelines

Rand al'Thor

Oh, @Hamlet, I had an interesting thought for you.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor And I think it's called "combinatorist", but I'll have to look this up.

Gilles

@Hamlet The people who decide how to format academic publications are publishers, not professors.

@Hamlet MLA?

Hamlet

@Gilles modern language association

Rand al'Thor

How do you think this site would receive a question about a piece of literature that's not published anywhere and has an unknown/anonymous author? For instance, if a friend of mine writes a poem and sends it to me, and I quote it in full here to ask a question about it?

"Death of the Author" taken to its logical extreme?

user61230

21:29

If Physics.SE and Math.SE conformed to academic standard in their answers, they'd wilt.

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas Huh, maybe it differs between countries.

b_jonas

Damn, you're right. It is called "combinatorialist". Though whether I am one is debatable.

Hamlet

> the Modern Language Association (MLA) is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Nah, I probably just don't know these English terms.

Rand al'Thor

@Zyera I think Math[s]Overflow does.

user61230

21:29

@Randal'Thor To some extent, but it's not a journal standard.

Hamlet

They publish, among other things, a style guide that tells people how to format academic papers

That style guide is often required by teachers/professors in english classes

user61230

That doesn't change that guides are ultimately completely arbitrary.

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet Is studying literature in college a natural thing for people inspired by our site to do? They might just be inspired to read more, or to appreciate what they read in a different way.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor You don't mean like an "In memory yet green" poem which you wrote but you don't want to admit it and so say your friend wrote it, right?

Hamlet

@Zyera yes, but I think there is value in consistency

BESW

21:31

Square One TV: "Combo Jombo" by Regina

►

Rand al'Thor

Even I, who've always been a voracious reader, have been inspired by this site to read more widely (works from more different cultures) and more deeply (close reading etc).

b_jonas

Because if we can't find the piece of literature published anywhere earlier (not even in a not very reputable place), then we'll think i tis.

Hamlet

I do think it makes sense to be consistent about our titles, and if we are going to be consistent, we might as well use MLA.

b_jonas

Or do you mean an identification question where you want to find out the origins of some often circulated quote? I've seen some nice fake quotes attributed to various famous people.

Napoleon Wilson

@b_jonas I didn't know there even was a word for that.

Rand al'Thor

21:32

@b_jonas No, I mean one actually written by someone else. Though writing a poem yourself and then asking a question about it would be another interesting experiment (and would give the accepted-answer feature a somewhat different significance from usual).

b_jonas

@NapoleonWilson English has too many words.

Hamlet

I'm not doing this because I think academia is always right. I've said god knows how many times that it's important for this site not to copy everything about academia.

user61230

I struggle to see the value of conforming to an arbitrary standard for formatting, and I don't really see a reason why we need to care. As long as titles are readable, clear, and understandable, what is the added benefit of enforcing a specific standard?

Hamlet

9 mins ago, by Hamlet

And I enjoy being able to tell at a glance if, when looking for a copy of the text, I can search the title and get the book, or if I'll have to find out where the short story is published.

b_jonas

What did I start with those stars?

Napoleon Wilson

21:33

@b_jonas Heh, I even made up an entire author with biography once for a school presentation where I simply couldn't find (or was too lazy to find) a fitting poem and just wrote on myself. ;-)

Hamlet

And no one is enforcing a specific standard. I don't think anyone is, say downvoting questions that don't follow MLA in their formatting of titles.

b_jonas

@NapoleonWilson Yes, that happens too.

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson Ha! :-D

BESW

As usual, RPG.SE has dealt with a similar issue:

20

Q: Standardization of English, etc.

In a recent (otherwise quite solid) edit of “Will changing an artifact sword to another weapon type impact game balance much?”, @okeefe changed the British spelling “artefact” to the American spelling “artifact.” Searching our meta, I see no rule regarding whether a particular spelling is prefer...

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson There are words for people specialising in many disciplines which are unknown to most people outside those disciplines.

3

Q: What's the word for someone who studies partial differential equations?

Mathematics has many words for the people who specialise in particular subdisciplines: geometers, who study geometry algebraists, who study algebra combinatorialists, who study combinatorics probabilists, who study probability statisticians, who study statistics analysts, who study analysis ???...

single-word-requests mathematics professions

b_jonas

21:35

Making up a whole fake person is less objectionable than making up fake quotes for a famous person. And some people do the latter, for some reason.

Hamlet

And again, I do think that using MLA formatting for titles is a really easy way for this site to look like we know what we're doing.

Rand al'Thor

@BESW American vs European English is a different kettle of fish, IMO, and one that already has a network-wide policy established by main meta.

b_jonas

There's this quote that's been circulated a lot claiming it's a quote by Goethe, but people have since disproved that because they can't find it in any reputable collection of Goethe poems or of translations or anything: hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Tudakoz%C3%B3/…

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas <insert Einstein meme here>

b_jonas

Nobody knows who actually wrote the snippet.

Hamlet

21:36

I'm going to leave now because I'm repeating myself and people are constructing straw-man versions of what I'm actually saying.

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas That sounds like it could make an excellent question for this site.

Napoleon Wilson

@b_jonas It's also less objectionable than the intimacy of admitting you wrote it, especially in school.

BESW

@Randal'Thor Functionally, the solution is the same, with the same reasoning: there's no universal "right way" and there's no particular need for one.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Yeah. “Don't believe everything you hear I said on the internet.” Einstein (and Yogi Berra also said the same but rephrased)

@Randal'Thor Not really, since enough people have researched it that it's almost certainly unanswerable. The link I have is from 2008, but the quote has been around since at least 1989.

user61230

@b_jonas I couldn't help but read that as "Yogi Bear" and was terribly, momentarily, confused.

Hamlet

21:38

I have said again and again that we shouldn't uncritically adopt academic concepts. There are many academic concepts that I think would be harmful for the site (such as a uniform citation style). But because I said it makes sense to use one academic concept...

Rand al'Thor

@BESW I think the issues are different. Hamlet's arguments in favour of using MLA style, for instance, simply don't apply to the American vs European English debate.

@b_jonas Being unanswerable doesn't necessarily make it a bad question.

3

@Hamlet Who accused you of that?

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Sure, but this is the type of unanswerable where you won't find new information or new opinions for it, not just the type of unanswerable where we'll have a lot of nice insight we can learn from even though we'll never know the correct answer for sure.

Rand al'Thor

Wow, 3 stars in a minute :-O

b_jonas

I won't post that question, but if you or someone else think it's worth, then you can post it.

BESW

If you can prove it's unanswerable, that usually makes for a great answer.

@Randal'Thor Why MLA? Why not Chicago, or Oxford?

Rand al'Thor

21:42

@b_jonas I post enough questions already - I want to encourage other people to post more :-)

user15026

I'm guessing because at least here, literature type academia tends to end up using MLA more often than not?

user15026

Although I think pushing people to this point of work to post is not going to help us with approachability

b_jonas

@BESW Yes, and there's already a nice reference for that in where I linked, namely a short article about just that one quotation giving an early source where it's attributed to Goethe and saying how people couldn't find it anywhere and it's definitely not Goethe.

BESW

Butcher's is more commonly used by publishers.

b_jonas

nyest.hu/hirek/…

Rand al'Thor

21:46

@BESW Hamlet at least tried to justify that here.

BESW

16

Q: What are widely-used UK-English style guides?

In the UK, what are the equivalents to Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press style guide, Yahoo, APA, MLA, etc? Most importantly, what are their intended audiences? (AP is used for journalists, Yahoo for the web, APA for academia, et cetera.) I'm specifically asking about style guides t...

style

b_jonas

That reminds me. I have photos of the table of contents of the big poetry translation books of Weöres Sándor and of Szabó Lőrinc. I should figure out where to put those online, if they aren't yet, so that people can find out what poems have good translations by those two.

(There are a few more poets from the Nyugat era with translation volumes that I should seek and add, but these are a good start.)

Let me search the web to see if these are already online in text form somewhere.

Many translations can be found online, such as on babelmatrix.org , but the full list would be worth.

Rand al'Thor

@BESW Well, if it's a matter of not following American style, then I'm all for it :-)

But it's not me you need to convince; it's Hamlet.

BESW

[shrug] I'm unsure what he's arguing for anyway.

I just know that on other sites attempts to standardize style are... not considered welcoming, and don't work anyway.

b_jonas

It doesn't look like the Szabó Lőrinc one is online (I found a partial list only).

Hamlet

21:54

@Randal'Thor why would anyone need to convince me of anything?

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet If they're looking to convince someone, that is.

Hamlet

@BESW in practice, I'm not really advocating for anything, cause I'm not saying we should get into edit wars about style.

I'm just saying that if you're unsure about how to format titles, MLA is the logical way to go for this site.

b_jonas

These books are so famous that if I search for any random poem in them, I don't find the complete collection, just a page quoting one poem or ten poems or giving a partial table of contents.

Hamlet

And I do think it's a good thing that we have a sort of informal consensus, in that most questions do use MLA formatting for titles.

BESW

@Hamlet Change that to "a" logical way to go, and I'll agree with you.

But it's an American-specific style guide and not obviously logical for, eg, Rand, to use.

If we ever get a professional editor in here, it's logical for them to use Butcher's.

b_jonas

21:58

@Hamlet I'm not trying to advocate that everyone should use some particular style in their titles. I'm just explaining why I use some style in what I write. People should use whatever style they prefer.

Hamlet

But at the end of the day, this probably isn't worth debating over.

BESW

You know what might be cool, is a meta question asking for answers that each talk about a particular citation style associated with our topic and how that style would be useful (and where it might not be useful) to use on lit.se.

Then if a user is struggling with style, we could point them toward a resource which lets them make an informed decision.

b_jonas

Argh! I give up. Every little smudge of ink Weöres put into that volume is so famous, and for a good reason, that when I search for it, I just find ten other quotes, not a list of the original.

Rand al'Thor

@BESW That sounds good! If we have some sufficiently informed people (you and @Hamlet, for instance?) who'd be willing to put in the legwork.

b_jonas

Next, let's push the SE people for an SE feature where you can enter citations in a machine-readable format (i.e. all fields marked) so that they can be converted automatically to whatever citation format someone prefers if they really care, and can also be processed en masse for machine stuff. We already use such templates on Wikipedias.

Not that every citation ever uses those templates, but still, many use them, which makes them easy to mine automatically.

But seriously. It doesn't matter what citation style you use, as long as it's reasonably understandible.

2

doppelgreener

22:04

@BESW Or alternately a good old civil war over the Oxford comma

Hamlet

@BESW Butcher's style guide appears to do the same thing with titles.

b_jonas

@doppelgreener If this was about Mathoverflow, I'd throw in the spelling of certain words as flame topic: color, colour; neighbor, neighbour; indexes, indices.

BESW

@b_jonas Different citation styles are more or less useful for different fields based on that field's focus, but generally speaking and for our purposes, yes.

@b_jonas I resisted the urge to suggest "combinatorix" earlier.

b_jonas

Sure, and I actually mean "use any reasonable citation style, but the only actually reasonable one is the one I use".

@BESW That's probably already the name of several different websites, pieces of software, maybe even non-research journals.

Hamlet

the formating of italics for books, quotations for short-stories seems to be relatively common.

BESW

22:08

Single quotes or double quotes? [grin]

doppelgreener

@BESW You know how I use commas for everything? I realised a couple of weeks ago I might've picked that up from Magic cards. EG see the comma usage on Alesha or Boonweaver Giant. Commas in the middle of any sentence that connects two ideas is how they get written.

Hamlet

ooh yikes I just saw this I'm about to die of rage

1

Q: What is the nature of the friendship in Don Henley's "My Thanksgiving"?

The first verse My Thanksgiving by Don Henley (from Inside Job) reads as follows: A lot of things have happened Since the last time we spoke Some of them are funny Some of 'em ain't no joke And I trust you will forgive me If I lay it on the line I always thought you were a friend ...

song-lyrics don-henley

Gallifreyan

I played Dominion and Magic Maze today. It was fun :D

Hamlet

quotes in title, italics in body, for something that should be quotes

BESW

I'm pretty sure I was over-using mid-sentence commas before I started playing MtG.

b_jonas

22:10

@Hamlet Yes, but then don't forget that like half of the style conventions come from the urge to abbreviate anything to spare paper in paper journals, and are more or less obsolete and just make things difficult in the modern age. In particular, abbreviating journal titles and using initials only of an author where something was published with full name words are such habits.

user61230

@BESW I still tend, to add the superfluous comma, now and, well, again.

BESW

@Hamlet Of course, you can't use italics in a title. So that sorta blows the whole "consistent style" thing out of the water for a Stack Exchange site.

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor to answer your question, I would be totally fine with a question about a self published poem, even if self-published meant you sent it to a friend.

I would also be fine with questions about converstions, etc.

b_jonas

(Using initials of authors when the author prefers a full name word even in the heading part of an article was already a really bad idea in the paper age, and never should have been done by any fucking paper, except possibly when Radnóti's poems were smuggled out of the concentration camp on small pieces of toilet paper or whatever that was.)

doppelgreener

@Zyera A couple of months ago mentioned my writing style involves a lot of commas. I went back across some old posts and was shocked to find that almost all my sentences had at least one comma in the middle in almost everything I wrote. So, now I take it as an exercise to see if I can improve a sentence by omitting comments, without reducing its legibility and likelihood to be read the way I want it to be.

BESW

22:12

@Zyera I don't worry about it too much in chat; excessive non-ending punctuation is conversational for me. But in my formal writing(,) I try to invoke Brenda Ueland's confidence that her sentence structure is almost always clear enough that a comma is unnecessary even when it'd be acceptable.

b_jonas

@doppelgreener Is this about your style of writing in English?

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor Given the importance of our phones, the great literature of tomorrow might consist of a text conversation. (with the caveat that great literature is a very biased concept, I'm just using it cause people on this site find it persuasive)

doppelgreener

@b_jonas Yup. (Native speaker too, so not a second language issue.)

b_jonas

"almost all my sentences had at least one comma" => that can depend on how long sentences you write.

doppelgreener

@b_jonas Longish, too. :) I'd often connect two sentences that could be better left as two sentences.

b_jonas

22:13

I definitely overuse commas, except when I write in an informal style such as for chats like this.

BESW

I strive for the clarity and precision of Shoghi Effendi and the breezy ease of Brenda Ueland.

user61230

That's where everyone's friend, the Semicolon, comes in!; use it to merge ideas to make sentences long and confusingly abstract!

doppelgreener

I was writing a meta post at some point and had BESW check the draft. He pointed me toward all the very long sentences I'd written throughout, and suggested that I wasn't quite yet at the point Shoghi Effendi had reached in mastering the multiple-paragraph sentence, and would be best separating ideas into individual sentences. It helped a lot.

(Shoghi Effendi writes such elegant multi-paragraph sentences I wouldn't realise that's what's going on until I took a second glance.)

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet "Given the importance of our phones" - speak for yourself, bah humbug, kids these days.

Hamlet

I also wouldn't mind seeing questions about, say, conversations.

BESW

22:15

@Hamlet See also, cell phone novels.

Hamlet

or questions about interviews.

Rand al'Thor

@Zyera A semicolon after an exclamation mark? cringes

b_jonas

As for very long sentences, Stanisław Lem was a master of that.

doppelgreener

@Randal'Thor [rand writes from his phone]

b_jonas

Or at least it seems so from the translations.

Hamlet

22:16

Or questions involving, IDK, the close reading of math papers. Hint hint @Randal'Thor

b_jonas

But I respect Murányi's translations, they're probably very accurate.

Rand al'Thor

@doppelgreener I've never written anything on SE from a phone. Except once or twice for Winter Bash hats, and that was from someone else's phone.

doppelgreener

@Randal'Thor nice :D

a worthwhile reason to use a phone

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet You've mentioned this idea before, but I'm not sure how to come up with such a question and make it literary as opposed to mathematical.

b_jonas

@Hamlet The problem with math papers is that there are very few good math writers, and a lot of good textbooks that should be written. Some good math expository writers I respect are Donald Knuth, Jiři Matoušek, and David Madore. And one of them are dead.

user61230

22:18

Just do what Zizek does and attach a seemingly unrelated lens to it. What if we consider math papers from an antihumanist perspective?

user61230

It seems ridiculous but there's actually valid consideration there.

Rand al'Thor

I don't even know what that means.

All these -ists and -isms look the same to me.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Wait, even ultrafinitism?

user61230

I guess you might not appreciate "antihumanism is non-essentialism applied to the individual" as a definition, then, huh ;)

b_jonas

I mean, that one doesn't even look the same in the sense that it can't prove some of the things normal people consider theorems.

Rand al'Thor

22:20

Surrealist, postmodernist, dadaist, antihumanist ... I'm sure they're all completely different from each other, but they're all just -ists to me.

b_jonas

Whereas mathematicians with an algebraic or analyst view look at exactly the same theorems and proofs, only find them and describe them differently.

Hamlet

>

Yes. My god. This question, I claim, it is inevitable, but I had hoped that it would be inevitable in the manner of Derrida’s messiah which is always coming but never comes, not in the manner of the inevitability of socialism. I should begin, I think, by saying that I have not read this book. In my house in Ljubljana, I have a hundred copies of each of my own books, there is no room for anyone else’s. It is a field of pure madness, pure narcissism, in the Lacanian sense, of course; it is the perfect image that constitutes the Subject. I may as well have made every wall a mirror. This boo…

@Randal'Thor rummages for link

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor How about impressionism?

Rand al'Thor

> In these days the angel of topology and the devil of abstract algebra fight for the soul of each individual mathematical domain.

BESW

I read an excellent example of this a few months ago... [rummages]

user61230

22:22

@Hamlet ...and sometimes I swear Zizek just utters nonsense until an idea happens.

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas Ditto. Just another -ism.

I don't even remember them all.

BESW

> "Hotel America: Everything You Wanted to Know About Guam's Colonization But Were Afraid To Analyze from 'Hotel California'." By Michael Lujan Bevacqua. Pacific Asia Inquiry. Fall2016, Vol. 7 Issue 1, p75-88.

user61230

Although that joke at the end. Okay, reading this I actually cracked up a little.

Hamlet

lol I can't find it

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Isn't that one of those things that's been happening for a hundred years at least, but people always think it's a new phenomenon, like xkcd.com/1601 and xkcd.com/1227 ?

Not that I completely agree with your phrasing, but still, something like that has been happening for long.

BESW

22:29

In English maths of the early 1800s, general symbols were a radical idea and conservative mathematicians wrote diatribes about the philosophical evil of using negative numbers in algebra.

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas Yes, that quote is from 1939 :-D

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Ah.

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor The Production of Space

Rand al'Thor

(Hermann Weyl)

b_jonas

Ok, in 1939, maybe he had a better reason to write "these days".

Bookworm

22:32

0

Q: What exactly happened with the glasses?

The man who wrote the diary displays a very strange reaction to what (for me) appears to be a negligible accident - having his and his friend's (with whom he was kissing) glasses entangle and fall on the ground. He picks them up, (some other woman comes in?), and he leaves in a hurry, despite hi...

russian-literature sigizmund-krzhizhanovsky autobiography-of-a-corpse

Rand al'Thor

Also, re those XKCD links ... it's easier to ignore a social phenomenon by turning into a joke than it is to address it and its causes and ramifications in a serious way.

user61230

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is a veritable mouthful of a name.

BESW

And there's a reading of Alice in Wonderland that a lot of the language play and even basic themes are "expressions of Dodgson's anxiety over the loss of certainty implicit in mathematicians' acceptance of the symbolical approach."

Rand al'Thor

Hmm, are you sure that name's transliterated correctly, @Gallifreyan?

b_jonas

@Zyera Nah, not really. It doesn't even have four consecutive consonants like real Russian names do.

Hamlet

22:34

aha!

Word's of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic @Randal'Thor

BESW

> 'She can't do Subtraction,' said the White Queen. 'Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife—what's the answer to that?'
- Through the Looking-Glass

Rand al'Thor

I know "rz" in Polish and "zh" in English represent the same sound; is that "rzh" really a "r" followed by a "zh", or is it a mashup of two transliterations?

b_jonas

It's not a Russian name probably, mind you.

user61230

@Randal'Thor The typical Russian transliteration would parse as "kr-zhi-zha"

BESW

(In the context of algebraic anxiety, the above quote can easily be read as satire on the idea of applying mathematical rules to language.)

b_jonas

22:35

@Randal'Thor Only one way to find out, let's see what the original spelling of his name is.

Rand al'Thor

"A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic" - no thanks.

b_jonas

Кржижано́вский apparently. Then it's an r followed by a zh

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor come on

b_jonas

So it is a Russian name apparently, the rz in the transliteration is just an accident.

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas Кржижано́вский - so yeah, the transliteration is right.

Yep, you're ahead of me :-)

Hamlet

22:37

@Randal'Thor what the heck happened to the whole I'm super interested in close reading thing?

It might not be as good as Darwin's Plots but it's about math.

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet ... nothing?

Being interested in close reading doesn't mean I want to read "a feminist reading of the history of logic".

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor I dunno. I prefer ISO-9 romanizations for Russian names, so make it Kržižanovskij.

user61230

@Randal'Thor The discussion in that book is actually fairly pertinent, even if the author isn't overly skilled at presenting it, and the title makes the topic seem loaded.

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor so you have in front of you an excellent example of close reading but you aren't going to read something because it has the word feminist in the title?

@Zyera you've read it?

b_jonas

Why does it have a stress mark for a Russian name though?

user61230

22:39

@Hamlet It's been snipped a bit for me, and I've seen it discussed. I haven't read it in full glory.

b_jonas

Isn't that a bit unusual to write out in a name?

user61230

I don't plan to; I think there are better discussions of the same topic.

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet I didn't say it was the word feminist I objected to. Logic theory isn't really my cup of tea either.

Hamlet

@Zyera oh, I haven't read it either, I just saw it cited by an author who I highly respect

What would be a better source (asking cause I'm looking for one)

user61230

The theory is that the praxis of logic is less so guided by a dispassionate search for universals, and more so by an ongoing power struggle.

2

Rand al'Thor

22:41

I've been enjoying close reading of all sorts of things; I don't need to seek out "an excellent example of close reading".

BESW

@Zyera Sounds like it dovetails with some indigenous scholarship theories I've been recently osmosizing.

user61230

@Hamlet On the use of a feminist lens in the history of the sciences?

b_jonas

@Zyera Huh? Do you have to wear monocles and read it in a music criticism radio program to speak those words?

Hamlet

@Zyera no, on mathematics

user61230

@Hamlet I've got people I can ask, I'll see if I can dig something up for you :]

user61230

22:42

@BESW They're very closely related.

Rand al'Thor

@Zyera See, sentences like this make my eyes glaze over. I don't think I could possibly enjoy a book like that.

BESW

I was just talking yesterday with someone studying indigenous scholarship, about how stark the contrast is to the praxis of a visiting European scholar.

user61230

@Randal'Thor That's understandable. I don't think there's anything wrong in that not being appealing to you.

user61230

I think there's value in reading works like it, either way - and trying to understand them, enjoyable or no. But I definitely get that.

2

user61230

(Not all books I read for pleasure.)

user61230

22:46

@BESW I'd be really curious to hear about this in more detail. That sounds like a fascinating discussion. (Though I'm about to nap, and may jump out for a little bit, I'll read up when I can! If you do describe, that is.)

BESW

Roughly speaking, in Western scholarship the scholar is apart from and above the subject, while indigenous scholarship tends to treat both scholar and subject as equal participants in the same system.

It's a deeply epistemological divide that I'm still struggling to cross myself, so my explanations are... limited.

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