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Present posted:I like words. Like the word "laconic." I love Laconian terseness. My favorite response is from Herodotus, describing how the Samians came to Sparta for aid. The Samians spent a full day describing their predicament, at which point the Spartans said they'd gotten bored and forgotten what the Samians had said. The Samians came back the next day with a sack, and said "Our sack needs grain". The Spartans said "we can see the sack; you could have just said "needs grain." (But the Samians got the aid.)
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 03:42 |
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# ? May 14, 2024 19:31 |
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Present posted:Another word is "decimate." No we don't? "Decimal" obviously comes from the same root ("decem" meaning ten) but "decimate" has nothing to do with decimal points.
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 04:00 |
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Present posted:My favorite example of a laconic phrase is: The scene in 300 where the Persian messengers arrive and demand "earth and water" to show Sparta's submission to the Empire actually happened (albeit for the first Persian invasion of Greece under Darius). The Spartan response was "get it yourself" before throwing the messengers down a well.
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 04:25 |
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Byzantine posted:The scene in 300 where the Persian messengers arrive and demand "earth and water" to show Sparta's submission to the Empire actually happened (albeit for the first Persian invasion of Greece under Darius). The Spartan response was "get it yourself" before throwing the messengers down a well. Literally all the best lines in 300 are taken from Herodotus. And they left some great lines out.
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 04:32 |
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BuddyChrist posted:I've love his videos but haven't read too much from him, can you recommend a good memoir/autobiography? What do you care what other people think. http://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/0393320928/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 04:56 |
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Present posted:I like words. Like the word "laconic." This is a really cool story, but the sad truth for the Spartans was, they just weren't a threat by then. Attacking them was literally a waste of time for Philip II, and Alexander didn't need them at all. While checking my facts on this I came across maybe the best comeback I've seen in ancient Greece: quote:It simply wasn't worth the time for Phillip or Alexander to conquer the Spartans- they held very little territory and were on the decline. In fact, after Alexander began conquering Persia, he sent back trophies to Athens inscribed with "This was taken by all the brave Greeks- except the Spartans," (or something like that) as the Spartans were the only Greeks to refuse to follow Alexander.
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 19:23 |
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I can't help but think of Spartans torn between getting mad and saying the last bit is unnecessary and detracts from the burn.
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 19:30 |
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Tiggum posted:No we don't? "Decimal" obviously comes from the same root ("decem" meaning ten) but "decimate" has nothing to do with decimal points. I've said it before, as much as I like this thread, the majority of it is historical myth as opposed to actual fact. Generally if there's a story of "this word originated from this" or "this thing was named after this" it's going to be a tall tale or guess
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 20:31 |
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Aesop Poprock posted:I've said it before, as much as I like this thread, the majority of it is historical myth as opposed to actual fact. Generally if there's a story of "this word originated from this" or "this thing was named after this" it's going to be a tall tale or guess Considering that was always the intent of the thread and the first OP was: cash crab posted:RULES: I'd say this thread is doing exactly what it set out to do.
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 22:20 |
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Some things are a bit more clear-cut though, like etymology
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# ? Feb 5, 2016 22:27 |
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Barring the atomic bombings, the Battle of Borodino on September 7th, 1812, was the single bloodiest day in all of military history, and possibly human history.
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# ? Feb 7, 2016 07:22 |
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Arcsquad12 posted:Barring the atomic bombings, the Battle of Borodino on September 7th, 1812, was the single bloodiest day in all of military history, and possibly human history. I'm not familiar with this but I feel like the Golden Horde had a more gruesome kill count. Lacking in nuclear weapons as they were.
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# ? Feb 7, 2016 07:36 |
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Arcsquad12 posted:Barring the atomic bombings, the Battle of Borodino on September 7th, 1812, was the single bloodiest day in all of military history, and possibly human history. A quarter of a million people died from the 2004 tsunami. Also there's the firebombing of Tokyo.
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# ? Feb 7, 2016 07:50 |
syscall girl posted:I'm not familiar with this but I feel like the Golden Horde had a more gruesome kill count. Lacking in nuclear weapons as they were. Genghis Khan and his army managed to kill 1.25 million people during the conquest of Khwarezmia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_Khwarezmia
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# ? Feb 7, 2016 12:34 |
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syscall girl posted:I'm not familiar with this but I feel like the Golden Horde had a more gruesome kill count. Lacking in nuclear weapons as they were. Spoeank posted:A quarter of a million people died from the 2004 tsunami. Single Day, not multiple.
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# ? Feb 7, 2016 14:57 |
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It's a few pages back, but the castrati discussion reminded me of the existence of Michael Maniaci, who's about as close to a castrati singer as you can get in modern times without maiming someone. It's all in the Wikipedia article, but to summarize: Maniaci went through puberty normally, but for some reason (i.e. not related to hormones) his larynx went through very little change, leaving him with a very young-sounding voice. This is of course a very rare occurrence, and for it to happen in someone who was already a skilled vocalist is ludicrously long odds. Here's a short video of him singing, along with interviews of him and experts talking about his voice.
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# ? Feb 7, 2016 16:14 |
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Proportion-wise, the Black Death was unbelievably dead, something like 1/3rd of the Asia and Europe's population was killed by it. However, the most deadly pandemic to ever occur by pure body count, (for which we have a somewhat reliable body count), was the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918, which killed only 1/30th of the world's population.
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# ? Feb 7, 2016 17:58 |
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Arcsquad12 posted:Single Day, not multiple. Edit: nm
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# ? Feb 7, 2016 18:59 |
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Spoeank posted:So because the Tokyo firebombing took place overnight it's disqualified. A. The Tokyo firebombing was multiple attacks, not just one. B. People died over periods of days of weeks from burns and other nastiness, rather than in one big apocalyptic death count.
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# ? Feb 7, 2016 19:01 |
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RagnarokAngel posted:Well Hence my edit. I was being dumb and hoped nobody saw
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# ? Feb 7, 2016 19:03 |
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Spoeank posted:Hence my edit. I was being dumb and hoped nobody saw I was at work, so I didn't. I just thought it was neat. Looking on Wikipedia, Gwynne Dyer apparently described the casualties at Borodino as a fully loaded Boeing 747 crashing with no survivors, every five minutes for eight hours. Seventy thousand casualties at minimum in one day. The only thing that comes close to that was July 1st 1916 at the Somme.
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# ? Feb 7, 2016 23:44 |
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If we're going for multiday deaths, Smallpox wins every time. Just in the last hundred years before it was eliminated by vaccines, it beat out war. Not one specific war, or even all wars in those 100 years, but every war in human history combined. It was around for ~10k years even before that, so war has some catching up to do.
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# ? Feb 8, 2016 00:36 |
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Arcsquad12 posted:I was at work, so I didn't. I just thought it was neat. Looking on Wikipedia, Gwynne Dyer apparently described the casualties at Borodino as a fully loaded Boeing 747 crashing with no survivors, every five minutes for eight hours. If we count disease outbreaks, Spanish Flu killed an average of 100,000 people every day for a year between August 1918 and July 1919.
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# ? Feb 8, 2016 01:04 |
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:If we're going for multiday deaths, Smallpox wins every time. Just in the last hundred years before it was eliminated by vaccines, it beat out war. Not one specific war, or even all wars in those 100 years, but every war in human history combined. It was around for ~10k years even before that, so war has some catching up to do. And then there's the Americas.
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# ? Feb 8, 2016 06:00 |
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The priest in Åkirkeby on the Danish island of Bornholm enumerated the deaths from the black plague in 1653–4. 4895 people had died. In 1658 there's supposed to have been around 8000 people, so more than a third of the population died. Not in one day, but a pretty intense proportion. Left page, right column: https://www.sa.dk/ao-soegesider/billedviser?bsid=159152#159152,26756803
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# ? Feb 8, 2016 06:21 |
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And that was 300 years after the peak of the plague's death toll.
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# ? Feb 8, 2016 06:51 |
The oldest purse that we know off was made in Leipzig between 2500 and 2200 bc. It was decorated with dog teeth.
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# ? Feb 8, 2016 17:45 |
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Snapchat A Titty posted:The priest in Åkirkeby on the Danish island of Bornholm enumerated the deaths from the black plague in 1653–4. Not quite ancient history, but there's a Hungarian black metal band named Bornholm because of the islands association in those parts with disease and death. I don't know if it's correct or not, but I was told they didn't even know that it was an island, not a mythical disease, when they picked the name :iamafag:
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# ? Feb 9, 2016 10:22 |
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:If we're going for multiday deaths, Smallpox wins every time. Just in the last hundred years before it was eliminated by vaccines, it beat out war. Not one specific war, or even all wars in those 100 years, but every war in human history combined. It was around for ~10k years even before that, so war has some catching up to do. Doesn't malaria have a higher total, like probably billions?
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# ? Feb 11, 2016 11:21 |
Molentik posted:Doesn't malaria have a higher total, like probably billions?
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# ? Feb 11, 2016 11:58 |
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Nessus posted:I thought malaria usually doesn't directly kill you (though it can). If billions of people had died of malaria in recent history, even if they were poor people in the global south, I imagine there would have been somewhat more urgency regarding its treatment. Yeah malaria isn't all that deadly. There are over 200 million cases a year but it kills less than a million people right now. It's also caused by a parasite rather than a virus so it's easier to treat without vaccines. Given that it's spread by mosquitoes it's also not a horrifyingly virulent death plague like smallpox.
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# ? Feb 11, 2016 12:52 |
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Molentik posted:Doesn't malaria have a higher total, like probably billions? Malaria depends on its environment. Smallpox doesnt.
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# ? Feb 11, 2016 12:52 |
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Yeah malaria isn't all that deadly. There are over 200 million cases a year but it kills less than a million people right now. It's also caused by a parasite rather than a virus so it's easier to treat without vaccines. Given that it's spread by mosquitoes it's also not a horrifyingly virulent death plague like smallpox. And you can treat syphilis with it! Just give your patient malaria, wrap them in blankets and let them heat up to the point of near death. This kills the syph, and then you treat the malaria with G&Ts on the verandah.
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# ? Feb 11, 2016 15:40 |
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You can also catch malaria again and again and again(like STDs). Some types of Malaria (of which there are a wide variety apparently) even have cyclical reinfection cycles. A guy I know at my school got malaria while doing charity work in Niger, and he's in the throes of another infection. From what he posts on Facebook, it sounds like a really lovely time. However, malaria usually kills the young, the old, and the already sick. If you get malaria a few times, your body builds up a sort of immunity to it that makes subsequent malarial infections far less frequent.
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# ? Feb 11, 2016 17:04 |
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This mummified corpse is Charles XII, who famously shouted "Don't be afraid!" before taking a bullet straight to the dome.
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# ? Feb 11, 2016 17:08 |
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A White Guy posted:
or a button
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# ? Feb 11, 2016 17:23 |
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Folk like to say (even in the book I pulled this from, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence ) that "homosexuality" doesn't apply to people in the past, but there are behaviors attested which appear pretty explicitly romantically homosexual.
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# ? Feb 11, 2016 17:48 |
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Dyer gay, so what?
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# ? Feb 11, 2016 20:39 |
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Just the word "homosexuality" itself is a modern psychological term. That brings with it a ton of extra baggage. Yeah, some people in the past had exclusive same-sex romantic relationships. Some people only banged people of the same sex. The whole concept of romantic friendship in nineteenth century America pretty clearly shows that same sex romantic affection without intercourse was one pretty normal. That doesn't make what they were doing "homosexuality."
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# ? Feb 12, 2016 01:42 |
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# ? May 14, 2024 19:31 |
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Would marriage rituals between men and women during those periods not be considered "heterosexual" then?
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# ? Feb 12, 2016 02:13 |