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November 9

Paraphrasing

Dictionary, even Wikipedia, definitions of the word paraphrase usually make no mention of the fact that people often use the word when they manipulate a famous quote to add a humorous slant or even change its meaning. Why is that? Imagine Reason (talk) 14:10, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Please give an example of the phenomenon you describe. --Viennese Waltz 15:00, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think that would be a misquotation; a paraphrase specifically preserves the intended meaning. Alansplodge (talk) 15:14, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Imagine Reason: I think I know what you mean: a situation where somebody uses the phrase "and I paraphrase..." before saying whatever it is. To me it can have slightly humorous overtones. I've Googled that phrase and haven't come across any examples (yet) of famous quotes being changed in this way, but I think the first sentence of this abstract might be what you're getting at: The theme of this Peer Review Week is diversity, and I paraphrase the original citation of M. Forbes, “Diversity: the art of thinking independently together,” because it says it all. Am I on the right lines? Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!) 16:04, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Malcolm Forbes is widely reported to have said, either "Diversity is the art of thinking independently together"^[1][2][3] or "Diversity: the art of thinking independently together".^[4][5][6] so the "paraphrasing" consists of the substitution of reviewing for thinking. I cannot find when and where Forbes is supposed to have said this, but it may have been a riff on a famous phrase by Alexander Meiklejohn that he used in an article from 1938: "the art of democracy is the art of thinking independently together".^[7] --Lambiam 23:39, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'd call a mangled quotation only a misquotation when it is accidental or intended to mislead. The phenomenon here involves a variation on some motto, adage or maxim where the audience is assumed to be aware of the fact that it is a variation. This is definitely not included in the commonly understood meaning of paraphrase. We may call this overextension erroneous, but if enough people succumb to this it will find its way into dictionaries and become normalized. --Lambiam 23:55, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

An allusion, perhaps. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 03:27, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

An examples is Parafraseando a Trotski: “ Tú quizá no estás interesado en el poder, pero el poder sí está interesado en ti”., "Paraphrasing Trotsky,'You may not be interested in power, but power is interested in you.". wikiquote:Leon Trotsky has it:

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

This was attributed to Trotsky in an epigraph in Night Soldiers: A Novel (1988) by Alan Furst but it may actually be a revision of a statement earlier attributed to Trotsky: "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you." Only a very loose translation of "the dialectic" would produce "war."

[...] It is best described by paraphrasing Trotsky's aphorism about the dialectic: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

This statement on dialectic itself seems to be a paraphrase, with the original in In Defense of Marxism Part VII : "Petty-Bourgeois Moralists and the Proletarian Party" (1942) — where Trotsky publishes a letter to Albert Goldman (5 June 1940) has been translated as "Burnham doesn't recognize dialectics but dialectics does not permit him to escape from its net."

Parafraseando a Trotski sobre la guerra, Francia puede no estar interesada en la etnicidad, pero la etnicidad sí está interesada en Francia. "Paraphrasing Trotsky on war, France may not be interested in ethnic difference, but ethnic difference is interested in France."

In Spanish, paráfrasis:

3. f. Frase que, imitando en su estructura otra conocida, se formula con palabras diferentes.

"Sentence that, imitating the structure of a known one, is formulated with different words."

--Error (talk) 10:00, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Snowclone mentions "cliché", "phrasal template", "memeché", "catch structure". I propose "template quotation".

--Error (talk) 10:04, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

So we see the beginning of the foreseen ~~intrusion~~ inclusion in dictionaries. Restricting ourselves to English, the author confessing to a variation on Forbes could have written, "and I snowclone the original citation of M. Forbes". (BTW, the term citation here is strange; the original use by Forbes was not a citation, and the citations of his dictum were not original.) --Lambiam 14:09, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

November 11

"Over against"

Is "over against" specifically a religious usage? I see it a lot in religious writing (even contemporary) but seemingly nowhere else. 71.126.56.219 (talk) 23:01, 11 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I thought it was the 17th-century way of saying "across from" (that's how I've encountered it). AnonMoos (talk) 23:13, 11 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes or "opposite":

And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury... Mark 12:41 from the King James Version of the Bible. Although more modern translations came into widespread use in the 20th century, some conservative Christians continue to promote the exclusive use of the 17th-century text; see for example, the King James Only movement. Alansplodge (talk) 21:21, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a way to read this blurry text?

Just curious if anyone has super-human vision or a way to read this. Viriditas (talk) 23:21, 11 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Second paragraph begins with "After college, Olga was hired by the", something something, "on the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles".

Third paragraph begins with "By the time she retired in 19<xx>" and ends with "still used all over the world today". DS (talk) 01:38, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. In other news, the yearbook spells her name (and her sister I believe) as Hartmann, but later she went by Hartman. Was this common for people to drop letters? Viriditas (talk)|

Misspellings happen all the time. As to this picture, it seems like all of those plaques at Waterloo [Illinois] High are blurry. Your best bet might be to contact them and see if they have a larger version or can provide you with the text. This might be her obit if you're looking for more info.[8] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:20, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Viriditas -- German-language names generally end in "-mann", English in "-man", so it would have been Anglicizing her name, not dropping a random letter... AnonMoos (talk) 04:13, 12 November 2023 (UT

Correct. My greater point is why, after 18 years, would this happen? In the US, anglicisation at this time often occurred upon entry to the country. Her family had already been in the US for some time. So it looks like it was for another reason. She graduated from the University of Illinois in 1926, and it shows her name as Hartman, so I'm assuming she changed it before she enrolled. What was the reason? Our article on Hartmann says it was a Jewish name. Would she have been discriminated against during college admission, and would simply dropping a letter help her get in to UI? Another thing that occurs to me is that she had other colleagues in her field who had the same name (we see evidence of this in the literature around the 1940s and 1950s). By dropping the last letter, her publications couldn't be confused with other "Hartmann". Viriditas (talk) 21:00, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'd think the Eastern European first names Olga and Frieda would sound fairly Jewish, in themselves. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:24, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Some more guess work:

"After college, Olga was hired by the Alan Hancock Foundation to work on the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles."
"By the time she retired in 19xx, xx, Olga Hartman was the world's most recognized authority on polychaetous annelids. She published, co-authored or even ..."

All tentative, of course. --Lambiam 12:23, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently, she retired in 1969.^[9] --Lambiam 12:43, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Very first line ends in (as should have been obvious) "graduated from Waterloo High". DS (talk) 15:36, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I know I'm probably imagining this, but is there any chance the first sentence says: "When Olga and her sister Freida Hartmann graduated from Waterloo High School in 1918...? Viriditas (talk) 20:54, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That seems possible, except that I'd expect "Frieda Hartman". The last word on the second line may be "oceanography". On the third line I imagine I'm seeing "shouldn't go to college, especially as women". --Lambiam 04:30, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How badly do you want this, Viriditas? I'm about 30–40 miles from Waterloo HS, and I could drive down there and ask if they would let me see and transcribe the text. It would probably be easier, though, to phone or e-mail the WHS Legacy Society and ask them for the text. Deor (talk) 00:18, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ha, no worries. What I really want is the source text it is based upon (pages 1-27 in Essays on Polychaetous Annelids: In Memory of Dr. Olga Hartman) which is impossible to find. Viriditas (talk)

Here's WorldCat's list of 147 libraries that have the book. Deor (talk) 01:00, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I know, but I would have to fly to Oahu. Viriditas (talk) 01:05, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, your user page doesn't divulge your location (though neither does mine). Deor (talk) 01:19, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's ok. I've been in Hawaii for 23 years, and I've been pretty open about it. Viriditas (talk) 01:23, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Where is the spelling "Hartmann" found? Note that "Hartman" with one "n" is a not uncommon Dutch name and that "Olga" and "Frieda" are both not unusual Dutch female given names (e.g. Olga Commandeur, Olga Zuiderhoek, Olga Zoutendijk, Frieda Belinfante). --Lambiam 04:30, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I found both "Olga Hartmann" and "Frieda Hartmann" here. Amazingly, almost everyone on that page has a German surname. The rhyme at the bottom of this page shows that as a high-school student she was an all-rounder. --Lambiam 04:45, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Around here (north London) there are few if any German residents, but what you see is typical of publications put out by the Jewish community. 2A00:23C4:79CD:B301:C5B0:A9F0:AAD0:3253 (talk) 11:43, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed that. I also noticed this: "Hartman destroyed most of her field notes, correspondence, and other personal records before her death so not much is known about her activities outside of the AHF." Viriditas (talk) 20:57, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Second paragraph, one but last line: "These expeditions took her all over the Pacific ??? and". (I expect it should be within the capibilities of a multimodal generative neural network trained on English texts to produce further plausible reconstructions.) --Lambiam 14:28, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This article includes a little bit of the text from the plaque: [10]. --Amble (talk) 17:45, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Great find, but I'm curious how the author got it so wrong. It says she "earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. in marine biology from Columbia University", but I've seen no evidence of that. She got both her degrees from Berkeley (which I'm still trying to verify). Viriditas (talk) 20:42, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Pure guess, based on scanty knowledge of medical degrees granted to women in the UK whan that was still widely frowned upon – is it possible that she studied at one university that did not then give degrees to women, but was granted them by another University that did? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.5.208 (talk) 20:48, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I just confirmed her MA[11] and PhD[12] at UC Berkeley. It just seems like a weird error for them to make. Viriditas (talk) 21:28, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think it says something to that effect in her bio on the WHS Legacy Wall in the last sentence of the first paragraph; the author in the Republic-Times just copied it:

"She graduated from the University of Illinois with a Bachelor's degree and went on to Columbia University in New York that had Master's and PhD in Marine Biology."

--Lambiam 22:17, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like it wasn't as much of an error as I thought. Just found this: A.B. 1926, University of Illinois; M.A. 1933. Ph.D. 1936, University of California; special study at Harris Teachers College, St. Louis, Missouri, and Columbia University.[13] Not sure what it means. Viriditas (talk) 23:15, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"A.B." is presumably "Bachelor of Arts", written "B.A." here in the U K. Is this the normal American way of writing it? Oxford writes some degrees like this, for example "Doctor of Medicine" is "D.M.", rather than "M.D.", but Bachelor of Arts is not one of them. She definitely got an Arts degree from Berkeley, but since she was a scientist why would she get that? 2.101.9.143 (talk) 11:23, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

See: https://admissionsight.com/what-is-an-ab-degree/ . Whether a particular institution issues an AB or a BA is entirely up to that institution. I can think of several reasons why a scientist might start with a BA instead of a BS: 1) the school they attended only offered BAs, 2) they had not originally intended on going into science, 3) they failed a particular class necessary for the BS but still fulfilled all qualifications for a BA. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:36, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you look at the undergraduate links in Olga Hartman, it looks like she was on track for a career in a health or medical field before studying marine biology at Berkeley under S. F. Light. See the category Category:Students of Sol Felty Light to get an idea of the students he trained. Viriditas (talk) 17:26, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I thought I was clear. I don’t know what this means regarding her work at Columbia or what she did there. I know what the other stuff means. Viriditas (talk) 17:05, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's perfectly normal for a scientist to pursue an Arts degree; e.g. Noam Chomsky, the renowned linguist, got AB and MA degrees from UPenn. Crash48 (talk) 08:39, 15 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Linguistics is or was often considered a social science, so those degrees would not necessarily be considered incongruous. I personally have a B.A. in a "hard science" discipline. I didn't have a choice in the matter, but it was apparently because I took too many humanities electives and not as many science electives as would have been preferred... AnonMoos (talk) 22:17, 15 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

November 14

Other name for "Grammar words"

Hi everyone, is there a better name for what i call "grammar words" (for lack of a better all-encompassing name), and by that I mean pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners etc. They are sometimes also described as the "closed class words". I am looking for a term that sounds much more serious than "Grammar words", which sounds like what a 5th grader would say. Many thanks in advance for your help. --Lgriot (talk) 02:26, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Parts of speech may be what you're looking for. Recent and more complex analyses also talk about 'open classes' and 'closed classes' of words, as described in the Functional classification section and the following section of that article.{The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.5.208 (talk) 03:30, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I see that another term used for "closed class words" (or at least, something similar to that term) is function words. (I read this stuff on the internet, I disclaim any actual expertise in this area.) Fabrickator (talk) 05:13, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That is the one! It works for me, thank you, Fabrickator ! --Lgriot (talk) 05:18, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

Titles

How come titles of major works are written in italics but titles of minor works are "written in quotation marks"?? Georgia guy (talk) 12:49, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Georgia guy: Because at some time in the past a consensus was reached between contributors to MOS:TITLES that that was how things should be. If you want to change it then, like everyone else, you can start a discussion. Bazza (talk) 13:01, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds to me as though he's not asking about style in Wikipedia, he's asking about style in books, magazines, newspapers etc. in general. Wikipedia house style in this matter follows common practice. Why it's common practice is a different question. --Viennese Waltz 13:25, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Before the digital age, a distinction could be made between a single physical entity (a book, a report, a newspaper or magazine, a gramophone record, a painting, ..., something you could move around) and content items as can be presented in such entities (a chapter, an article, a song). The convention was that the titles of physical entities are presented in italics, and those of separate content items not. Inasmuch as the convention is used for digital items, it is by analogy to its application in the analog era. --Lambiam 23:55, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

November 15

Is this text significant?

On the right side surrounding the photo here?— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 00:10, 15 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What photo? If you're referring to the "newspaper" page in the comic's second panel, it's a form of pseudo-Latin placeholder text, though it doesn't seem to be Lorem ipsum, exactly. Deor (talk) 00:43, 15 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I thought it might be. The photo was most of the second panel.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 23:06, 15 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Better image here, I think. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 03:42, 15 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like it's something produced by a "lorem ipsum generator". If you search for some of the words and phrases, you can find many examples online. [14]. It seems to have a list of Latin words from lorem ipsum as well as some others, which get mixed up at random. --Amble (talk) 05:40, 15 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

November 16

Do U C ? Besides English, are there other languages that use the verb Do as an auxiliary verb in "do you see" and likewise?

Additionally, are there languages that use their word for "whether", also as a question word functioning like how the English auxiliary word "do" functions in "do you see" and likewise? HOTmag (talk) 09:40, 16 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@HOTmag: I know a language that does not even use the 'you' pronoun to ask "do you see?" Not sure, however, how many other such languages exist.

--CiaPan (talk) 10:46, 16 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Revision as of 09:45, 16 November 2023 edit HOTmag (talk \| contribs) Extended confirmed users 8,206 edits →‎Do U C ? Besides English, are there other languages that use the verb Do as an auxiliary verb in "do you see"? ← Previous edit		Revision as of 10:47, 16 November 2023 edit undo CiaPan (talk \| contribs) Extended confirmed users, Pending changes reviewers 11,916 edits →‎November 16: Reply Next edit →
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	Additionally, are there languages that use their word for "whether", also as a [[question word]] functioning like how the English auxiliary word "do" functions in "do you see" and likewise? [[User:HOTmag\|HOTmag]] ([[User talk:HOTmag\|talk]]) 09:40, 16 November 2023 (UTC)		Additionally, are there languages that use their word for "whether", also as a [[question word]] functioning like how the English auxiliary word "do" functions in "do you see" and likewise? [[User:HOTmag\|HOTmag]] ([[User talk:HOTmag\|talk]]) 09:40, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
			: {{re\|HOTmag}} I know a language that does not even use the 'you' pronoun to ask "do you see?" Not sure, however, how many other such languages exist. {{Smiley}} --[[User:CiaPan\|CiaPan]] ([[User talk:CiaPan\|talk]]) 10:46, 16 November 2023 (UTC)