Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 December 8

= December 8 =

Admiral Jacobzoon?
Can anybody find a reference for an Admiral Jacobzoon. He apparently failed to relieve the besieged city of Antwerp when the Duke of Parma's blockading pontoon bridge was blown up by the engineer Federigo Giambelli. John Lothrop Motley calls Jacobzoon "the incompetent Fleming" (History of the United Netherlands p. 199). I wonder if I'm being misled by the weirdness of 16th century spelling. Alansplodge (talk) 10:03, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * It's gotta be Jacobszoon I think. Contact Basemetal   here  10:06, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Modern Dutch sources seem to call him Jacob Jacobsen, if I'm to judge by this (p. 32) and these. --Antiquary (talk) 11:23, 8 December 2014 (UTC) Or are some of them Flemish?  I'm seriously unqualified to tell. --Antiquary (talk) 11:53, 8 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Aha! As I thought, it was the spelling that was leading me astray. I had also missed his name in our Hellburners article which says "...the commander supervising the operation, Vice-Admiral Jacob Jacobsen, set all ships on their course in quick succession...". I had previously spent a good while searching for an Italian called "Genibelli" or "Genebelli", only to find it was actually "Giambelli".


 * Jacobsen or whatever doesn't seem to have distinguished himself anywhere else, so he will have to go without a Wikipedia article. Thanks. Alansplodge (talk) 14:24, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

UK graduate prospects a few years after graduation
British universities are subject to various ranking schemes, but in terms of career prospects, all of them seem to concentrate on what graduates do immediately after graduating. Cue lots of disparaging comments from the press and other third parties about the numbers from X subject or Y institution that end up doing bar work, even though (AFAIK) most will only be killing time for a month or two til a good job turns up. Seems to me that a ranking of what the same grads were doing three or five years later would be much more informative, but is this data collected and if so has anyone turned it into a scoresheet? 213.205.251.105 (talk) 14:29, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * This survey isn't immediately after graduation, but it seems to be working on 6 months out. Not the 3-5 years you are looking for, but still not immediate.  -- Jayron  32  15:12, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * This one also shows the 6-month job prospects. Perhaps the "6 month" figure is the national standard for comparison for these sorts of statistics.  -- Jayron  32  15:13, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the links, but that 6-month comparison is what I hoped to get past. It's just too soon to say anything much, positive or negative. Even the kids who sail straight through from their finals onto a gold-plated grad scheme won't have achieved much in just 6 months. 213.205.251.105 (talk) 15:35, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * This study appears to cover the graduation and employment information for the country as a whole, regardless of when they graduated. It may help give a more complete picture.  -- Jayron  32  17:40, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Negro
What year did the term Negro fall out of favour in the United States? --Allin Bagsnott (talk) 17:54, 8 December 2014 (UTC)


 * See here. From that graph, the decline started at about 1905, continuing to fall continuously until briefly returning into fashion in the mid 1960s, then fading again.  -- Jayron  32  17:58, 8 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks --Allin Bagsnott (talk) 18:05, 8 December 2014 (UTC)


 * So what was the popular term around 1955 ? "Black" ? StuRat (talk) 20:28, 8 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Why don't you use Ngrams to find out? Contact Basemetal   here  20:30, 8 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Because "black" has a much wider usage than as a replacement for "Negro", and I doubt if Ngrams can separate the usages. StuRat (talk) 21:10, 8 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Try "Black people" Contact Basemetal   here  21:14, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I know no-one asked for all of them, but I did all the ethnonyms I could think of for African-American people and put them into ngrams: here's the results. It looks like "black people" came into use in the early 1960s, "colored people" has remained relatively low in usage, while "African-American" and "People of Color" both becoming popular around the same time (early 1980s) with African American overtaking all other terms at around 1990.  -- Jayron  32  21:22, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Did a slight reworking of your ngram. "Blacks" is a very important ethnonym you were missing, and one glance at the chart makes it pretty obvious (1) how important in recent times and (2) that there aren't likely to be a lot of false positives there, given the timeframe in which the word majorly increases in use. - Jmabel &#124; Talk 06:55, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict; damn Jmabel, way to steal my thunder!) Here I've adapted your approach by adding "blacks", since that collective plural rarely refers to anything but the ethnicity, thus filtering out the other contextual meanings. The results seem to suggest that it remains significantly more popular than "African-American" in written contexts, though of course ngrams are not necessarily an absolute (or in some cases, even good) measure of what is used in every day speech. My, admittedly impressionistic, sense has always been that when one is talking informally about race or race culture, "black" tends to predominate, but in any formal or clinical context (or any time anyone is anxious about giving offense) "African-American" tends to take the lead.   But take that speculation with a grain of salt.   S n o w  talk 07:02, 9 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Afro-American began to appear at the same time as black people. It peaked in ~1988, soon after Jesse Jackson (iirc) announced a preference for African-American, but its decline has been slower than I thought. —Tamfang (talk) 01:33, 10 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Nope, that didn't catch on until after 1960, and "African-American" was later yet, so that leaves us with the more infamous N-word. StuRat (talk) 21:22, 8 December 2014 (UTC)


 * The term "Negro" was at one time considered a good word to use. Notice how many times MLK uses that term. I don't know that he used the term "black", which at that time was not used so much, and maybe because it was often used as in a racist way, as in the redundant "black n*gger". Closer to now, a couple of weeks ago I was watching Henry Louis Gates' season wrapup for his Finding Your Roots TV series. He typically uses the terms "black" or "African-American", but he also says "Negro" sometimes, pronouncing it more like "Nigro", short-I. I was a bit surprised to hear that coming out of his mouth, especially as it hints at the pronunciation slide that resulted in that hated word: negro, nigro, nigra, n*gger. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:12, 9 December 2014 (UTC)


 * One phrase in Bugs' remarks provokes my naughty brain to recite the defiant list of synonyms in Hair. —Tamfang (talk) 01:37, 10 December 2014 (UTC)
 * In terms of political correctness, in the UK in the early 1990s, the Guardian newspaper had a spell-checker with some sort of auto-correct, and it referred to Nelson Mandela as the 'Afro-Caribbean leader of South Africa'.  KägeTorä - ( 影 虎 )  ( Chin Wag )  07:16, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

How come right-to-left writing systems do exist at all?
Given that the majority of human beings are right handed it seems to be an anomaly that right-to-left writing systems exist at all. Are there any theories (e.g. based on the technique of writing) as to how various right-to-left writing systems came about where they do exist? Contact Basemetal   here  21:13, 8 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I can think of some possible reasons:


 * 1) It's only a problem when writing with pen and ink, since your hand can smear the ink. If the writing method predates pen and ink, such as impressions left on clay tablets or carved in stone, then it might be as likely one way or the other.  Tradition may then prevent them from changing the direction when pen and ink came along.  And now with keyboards, it's back to not mattering, one way or the other, again.


 * 2) Perhaps somebody famous started writing that way (maybe being left-handed), and that then became the tradition. For example, if Mohammed happened to write that way, I bet most Muslims would still do so.


 * 3) This method could be chosen to prevent people from touching the paper with their hands, since doing so would now leave a smear. (Something like speed bumps designed to keep people from driving at a reasonable speed.) StuRat (talk) 21:25, 8 December 2014 (UTC)


 * It is probably somewhat arbitrary; since both the right-to-left Hebrew alphabet and the left-to-right European scripts (including Runic, Greek, Latin, Coptic, etc.) both derive from the same original script, the Phoenician alphabet, which was usually written right-to-left like Hebrew. It should be made certain that not every arbitrary distinction has a cause.  Some random differences are random.  Wikipedia does have some info at Writing_system.  You can follow links from there to see where it takes you.  -- Jayron  32  21:27, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * But the fact that some left-to-right scripts are derived from right-to-left ones (Greek, the others you mention are derived from Greek, Ethiopic, Brahmi) is I think an indication that the left-to-right direction is more natural to the majority of people and therefore that there is something to explain regarding right-to-left scripts. Do you know of any script that evolved in the other direction, i.e. from left-to-right to right-to-left? In any case I was thinking of an explanation in terms of the writing technique. For example the way people wrote in old Japan was to hold a roll of paper in the left hand and the brush in the right hand. They would write a column of characters and then pull the paper with the hand holding the brush to the right and continue with a second column of characters. You can see how with this technique the top-to-bottom-and-right-to-left direction of writing arises naturally from the manner of writing. I was wondering if there might not be similar reasons for other right-to-left writing systems. Contact Basemetal   here  21:57, 8 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Actually, the Greeks sometimes went both ways, alternately. AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:36, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * But even in this case one direction is favored in the sense that the first line is always left-to-right isn't it? Contact Basemetal   here  21:57, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Engels theorised that, for a right handed person, it was easier to use a pen/stylus left to right, but hacking characters into rock/wood with a mallet and chisel would favour right to left. He noted that the scripts currently written left to right were originally chiselled, and right to left seemed to be stylus/pen derived, leading him to conclude that writing was invented by lefties, and that in antiquity, the current predominance of right over left handedness was reversed. Fiddlersmouth (talk) 23:57, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Why is it easier to chisel right-to-left? 36.226.142.183 (talk) 14:15, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Also note ancient Greek could be written both ways for alternate lines. Boustrophedon Collect (talk) 19:15, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Need the name of a movie
So I watched a movie a few years ago, and I can't remember what it was called. Basically, this guy is asked to smuggle beer across state lines in a truck. To evade the police, he has his accomplice in a muscle car get in a high speed chase with the police to divert attention from him.

The movie must have been from like the 70s or 80s.  Konveyor   Belt   22:56, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * That is the terrible but also great classic Smokey and the Bandit. Best regards--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 23:00, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
 * If by terrible you mean "maybe the best movie ever made", you'd be close to the truth... -- Jayron  32  03:59, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Leonard Maltin described it as being "about as subtle as the Three Stooges". And the Stooges were funny too. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:03, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
 * @Jayron32:  I maintain that there are lots of terrible movies that are also absolutely great. There are also terrible movies that are just terrible. Explaining that that can be difficult. There are many though.   @Baseball Bugs:   In that regard, Leonard Maltin can be clueless. I remember years ago he rated Highlander 2 higher than he rated Highlander (while panning both). I almost fell over.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 22:18, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Is there a category or term for this? I am quire sure The Fifth Element blows Porky's, The Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters and Caddyshack out the window. μηδείς (talk) 03:29, 10 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Oftentimes, the term cult classic is a term which often includes films which are unintentionally funny, funny for the wrong reasons, or low quality but still very entertaining. The textbook example is Rocky Horror Picture Show (which is more "campy" and in a sense "deliberately" bad), but even films like Reefer Madness or Plan 9 from Outer Space have lived on as "cult classics" for being unintentionally bad, but still entertaining in their lack of self-awareness in their own shittiness.  -- Jayron  32  13:21, 10 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Hello chaps! μηδείς, those clever fellows over at TV Tropes have a term for this - "So Bad it's Good" - take a gander at . Quintessential British Gentleman (talk) 00:53, 11 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Whenever a reviewer breathlessly announces a new movie "is destined to become an instant cult classic", I'm never sure whether they mean it will be tremendously popular; or tremendously  unpopular , except to a small band of devoted followers. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  19:02, 10 December 2014 (UTC)