Humanities desk
< July 1	<< Jun \| July \| Aug >>	July 3 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 2

Democracy, grass and donkey; to verify quote

Yesterday an Indian Supreme Court judge Surya Kant during a case hearing while making oral observation (is reported to have) said:

".. In a democracy, grass has the right to grow and donkey have the right to eat .."

This is in relation to free speech.

Whether this is first use of such quote / quip or it has been used earlier by any one else?

Bookku, 'Encyclopedias = expanding information & knowledge' (talk) 07:43, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As quoted in news sources, he is reported to have said, "donkeys have the right to eat", although one source has "donkey has the right to eat".^[1] I do not see other uses of this metaphor other than in this case. When it comes to freedom of speech and donkey rights, a witty expression is, "even a donkey has the right to bray".^[2][3] Applied to non-metaphorical donkeys, they may even have the right to eat whatever they find to eat;^[4] or in the view of some even to do as they please.^[5] --Lambiam 12:13, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I couldn't find anything either, the only possible connection is a story in the Panchatantra about a donkey who is lured to his death by a lion and a jackal with the promise of greener grass, [6] but that's probably just a coincidence. Alansplodge (talk) 13:34, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Are there any Portland, OR or NY-style downtown street systems where locals say "the x-hundred block of [foo Street]"?

I'm wondering if any downtown with BOTH ≥20 blocks per mile on 1+ axes AND mostly numbered streets says stuff like the 24-hundred block of 4th Street. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 09:26, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure I understand the constraints. To me, "1+" means "> 1"; since there is no such thing as 1.5 axes and current street systems use at most 2 axes, this appears to mean at least twenty blocks per mile on both axes, so blocks cannot be longer than 264 feet (80.5 m) in any direction. That seems to be a reasonable length for a block, neither too long nor too short, so you may need a measuring tape to see on which side of the fence they fall. Some uses of "N00 block of 4th Street": [7]; [8]; [9]; [10]; [11]; [12]; [13]; [14]; [15]. --Lambiam 11:40, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

1 or more integer axes. Manhattan is 20 per mile on the more important axis with the wider roads and usually more like 10 to 5 on the other axis but for a number of reasons including the byzantine Manhattan address algorithm no one says N00 block of foo Street. Portland, Oregon is 20 per mile on both axes which may be a 50th percentile block acreage in your country but is very small in America (only one axis is numbered too! Why is this so popular?). Downtown Salt Lake City blocks are 0.15*0.15 miles! Of the links Aurora names their streets so not that (names can encourage the N00 block nomenclature to save people from having to learn or look up so many names to know where anything is), Braddock only numbers one axis, Richmond has too many named streets, National City addresses are less than 20 hundreds per mile, Bandon only numbers one axis, Washington DC has too many unnumbered streets, Rochester Minnesota axes are both numbered (holy crap!) but aren't small or thin enough and Santa Monica blocks are thin enough (which presumably makes individual blocks seem less significant and would make it easier for N00 block-style nomenclature systems to sprawl to high syllable counts) but the avenues are named. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:10, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure on the spacing between roads, but my home of Hickory, NC, has numbered north-south streets and numbered east-west avenues (with a few named roads here and there). Constructions like "the 400 block of 8th Street NW" are reasonably common, but you're much more likely to just give the exact address of a place. I guess the blocks aren't thought of as entities themselves, just as conglomerations of the individual locations. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:53, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don't watch the show Cops often but they seem to say that a lot for some reason. Like "📻male going crazy on the 500 block of Oak Street" Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:38, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Reports may be coming in from multiple locations on the street. Also, officrs responding to a particular house number might be so focused on tgat address as to miss the fact that the suspect is now several houses down.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 18:37, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The large number of numbers must reduce the incentive to say Xth block of Yth Street. Compared to some other towns where you'd need to memorize the map to not need a map. Hickory's hundreds seem to have very inconsistent and often large spacings. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 17:11, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, we have lots of fragmentary streets with gaps between segments of the same road.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 19:10, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We have that in parts of the city proper too but coincidentally not in the part snobs call important (besides the few square miles settled before 1811 which are important too). Every time you hear the average price of Manhattan real estate they only count the pretty consistent part of the grid plus the pre-1811 (not cause they care about grid purity, cause one stop is billionaires and the next is ghetto (on the west side only the 2nd stop after the border is ghetto, the one in between is college students)) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:08, 3 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

If they are numbered, it is a no-brainer to memorize their relative positions. But with named fragmentary streets it is not so easy, like Tasso Street, Palo Alto, CA, which consists of six fragments spread out over more than two miles, with a gap of 0.7 miles between University Ave and Melville Ave. --Lambiam 23:37, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Street signs in San Francisco show such numbers, and nearly all of them say “n00”. Seems to me they'd be more useful if they showed “n00, n01, n98, n99” according to their corner. —Tamfang (talk) 00:35, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"War between the states"

Various people supporting the Lost Cause of the Confederacy narrative of the American Civil War insist that it be referred to as the "War between the states" (WBTS). Why is WBTS preferable in their view?

We have Names of the American Civil War, but I don't believe it says why those people prefer WBTS. Is there some hidden connotation of the term "civil war" that lost causers don't like? To me both terms seem pretty neutral, though I would never say WBTS just to avoid association with the lost cause. (Is it somehow inaccurate to describe this as a war between states?) Staecker (talk) 13:36, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Civil war implies a war within a single country. War between the states frames the conflict as between two naturally-separate national entities. From our article on the CSA: "Secessionists argued that the United States Constitution was a contract among sovereign states that could be abandoned at any time without consultation and that each state had a right to secede." WBTS privileges that legally-questionable viewpoint. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:08, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Are you suggesting that the phrase was intended as intending a war between the CSA and the USA as two sovereign "states" in the broader sense of the term "state"? I seriously doubt that. I'm fairly sure the Confederate usage of "state" meant the individual states that had seceded (or "declared secession" if you prefer). As I understand it the CSA was always meant to be a fairly loose union, perhaps with ambitions to be a "state" in the world community, but not really a nation-state. --Trovatore (talk) 18:40, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The section of Civil War Names that Staecker cites implies a connection from CSA/allies official communications during the war, including hostilities... between the Government of the United States of America and certain States styling themselves the Confederate States of America, to ex-CSA memoirs after the war using "War Between the States" explicitly. Citations are in-line for the former but not the latter, so you might have to ask at the article's talk page what reference/book those memoirs are cited in. You could go through Alexander Stephens's memoirs yourself, but that might be a proverbial haystick of 19th-century scrawl. SamuelRiv (talk) 18:56, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Back then, people (especially Southerners) did indeed see the United States as a federation of multiple sovereign nations (the states). Sort of like the EU (although the details of union were quite different). People tended to think of themselves more as a citizen of Massachusetts or Virginia than they did as a citizen of the US. The war changed that. Blueboar (talk) 19:01, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

And of course the US actually was a federation like that, before the Constitution of the United States replaced the Articles of Confederation. In Article 1 of the treaty that ended the American Revolution, the British acknowledged that all of the 13 colonies were now "free, sovereign, and independent states". --174.89.144.80 (talk) 22:15, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I guess I failed their dogwhistle cause the meaning clearly was "the war between the provinces" no double entendre till I saw this. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:32, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The American states are not provinces. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:11, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I know that. Normal people hear war between the states but Confederacy mourners hear war between the states. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 17:57, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand your comment. A = B? --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:51, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We hear war between the states, they hear war between the sovereign states. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:44, 3 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I thought the Confederacy preferred term was War of Northern Aggression. 2601:648:8202:350:0:0:0:FD2B (talk) 19:41, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't that a bit too blatantly obvious? The "War Between the States" has a neutral point-of-view ring, but will do to signal your pov to dogs in the audience. --Lambiam 23:40, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Can anyone name a "Civil War" before 1861 that was other than a contest by two parties to rule the same territory? —Tamfang (talk) 00:38, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The rebellion of the Kometopouloi in 976 is called here a "civil war of secession". --Lambiam 10:55, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) Our language seems to lack a disambiguation between a war where part of a nation fights to become independant of the rest (as in the American Civil War or the Nigerian Civil War), against when polities that both enjoy support across a whole nation fight for control (as in the English Civil War, the Irish Civil War or the Russian Civil War). Alansplodge (talk) 11:03, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Well, there's "war for independence", but that seems an unpopular choice if those wanting independence lose.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 17:16, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The use of the term "US Civil War *particularly* my AP US History Teacher. To him, good examples of Civil Wars were England (Cromwell's time) Spain (1930s), China (late 1940s) and Russian (1918-1920ish) and he was a northerner!Naraht (talk) 23:26, 9 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Best ten days of the year

Some fundraising adverts on Facebook recently make reference to "these best ten days of the year". Presumably this is some sort of cultural reference. To what? Thanks, DuncanHill (talk) 22:41, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It's a reference to the first 10 days of Dhu al-Hijjah, a special time in the Islamic calendar when Muslims are extra charitable. Blueboar (talk) 23:18, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, thank you. DuncanHill (talk) 23:28, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

To me, the transcription "Dhu al-Hijjah" is rather odd, since the "a" in "al-" is definitely not pronounced in Arabic in this phrase. An article with a parallel name was "Dhul-Qarnayn" when I was paying attention to it, but was renamed in this edit: [16]. I'm not sure I see the point of the apparent current convention, since it would lead those who don't have knowledge of Arabic to give these words an incorrect pronunctiation. AnonMoos (talk) 23:58, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Might Dhu'l-… be preferable? —Tamfang (talk) 00:39, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Tamfang -- Yes, I would prefer "Dhu'l-" (no space), or perhaps rather "Dhu 'l-" (with space)... AnonMoos (talk) 21:43, 5 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dhu ul-Hijjah would also be defensible.^[17] Although in the pronunciation the consecutive us are contracted to a single vowel, so would they be in common English pronunciation. The placement of spaces and the use of hyphens in transliteration of forms akin to X al-Y (see Iḍāfah), in which the definite article al can morph into various forms, appears to be unsystematic and not to follow the spacing in the Arabic orthography. We have strangely spaced Darul uloom (spacing in Arabic is as in Dar ul-uloom) and spaceless Jumu'atul-Wida. We have hyphenated Nar as-samum next to unhyphenated Alam al Mulk. --Lambiam 10:21, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Lambiam -- The word "Dhu" has a long vowel, which always obliterates the vowel of a following definite article, while in many of the other forms you cite there's a short i'rab vowel, which is pronounced or omitted rather variably between Classical Arabic and modern forms of Arabic. AnonMoos (talk) 21:43, 5 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]