[HN Gopher] Kairos
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Kairos
Author : tosh
Score : 208 points
Date : 2021-10-10 11:11 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| agumonkey wrote:
| this concept is rather interesting, critical even..
|
| how many people were right but too early
|
| how many were too yet too late
|
| sensing the right time is so important.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Incidentally, it's also a rather unique and absolutely superb red
| wine from northern Italy.
|
| https://www.zyme.it/en/prodotti/kairos
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's a cool word.
|
| Stolen, and added to my arse-nal.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| That's cool, so it seems like chronos and kairos seem to
| respectively come from more objective and subjective sides of
| looking at things. Like comparing the concept of atomic time with
| concepts like "go time" or "high time" or even "Miller time".
|
| The various definitions and examples seem to attempt to bring the
| term into objectivity by hinting at the clear and immediate
| downside risk of not paying due attention to kairos, but I wonder
| if there have been a lot of impatient people out there who have
| been frustrated with e.g. their elders advising more kairos-style
| heed be given and more waiting be endured, in vague, frustrating
| situations...
| futuretile wrote:
| In school I learned it as a fourth persuasive method in
| addition to ethos, pathos, and logos.
|
| "The perfect moment" is how my professor described it
| woah wrote:
| This is like how German has the words "Burste" and "Pinsel".
|
| Burste is a brush that one might use for scrubbing, while Pinsel
| is a paintbrush, usually with a pointed tip.
| vidarh wrote:
| In that case it's an example of a Germanic vs. Romance/Latin
| origin, which is quite common in English when you have two
| related but very different words (e.g. beef via French, while
| cow is Germanic). The interesting thing here is that the other
| Germanic languages _also_ have the split, which isn 't quite as
| common, but not _unusual_.
|
| So you get English brush, German Burste and Norwegian borste
| from proto-Germanic origin, and German Pinsel,
| Norwegian/Swedish pensel and English pencil from Latin via Old
| French pincel/pincil.
|
| Obviously the meaning diverged, but it makes sense when you
| consider that a fine paintbrush was also a writing instrument,
| and so when a lead/graphite stick became common English ended
| up with a meaning for pencil referencing that writing
| instrument while e.g. German and Scandinavian (and possibly
| other Germanic languages but haven't checked) instead picked
| some variant of "lead pen" (e.g. German Bleistift, Norwegian
| blyant) for pencil while retaining the "paintbrush" meaning for
| the latin-derived word.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| We used this as one of my son's middle names.
| pachico wrote:
| The Spanish version seems to me much better at explaining its
| meaning.
| willdearden wrote:
| Reminds me of the Kairos retreats popular in Catholic high
| schools. I went to one and it was pretty intense and not in a
| forced way. Basically 4 day group therapy.
| birtoise wrote:
| It is still a thing, at least in Brazil afaik. My cousin went
| to one these retreats the other day, he tried to convince me to
| go with him but I don't like those. He said it was really
| intense and very "close to god".
| bobthechef wrote:
| Prudence is essential here, which means so is humility.
| raldi wrote:
| It's apropos that this was posted at the optimal time to rise up
| the front page, and that identifying such time is more of an art
| than a science.
| azernik wrote:
| This seems like one of those posts where an exoticizing foreigner
| picks up a perfectly normal word and says it "means" a whole lot
| of extra things, just because it was used in philosophical texts
| writing about those things.
|
| From other comments, it's just a distinction between "duration"
| and "instant". Nothing deep, exists in lots of languages. If you
| want to get the joy of Greek philosophy, you're going to need the
| philosophy. It isn't just magically included in the language.
| exolymph wrote:
| A great deal of the Wikipedia article is about the term's
| philosophical usage in different schools of thought, so... what
| are you mad about exactly?
| azernik wrote:
| That the article poses the philosophical works as being part
| of the definition of the word.
|
| From the opening:
|
| "Kairos (Ancient Greek: kairos) is an Ancient Greek word
| meaning the right, critical, or opportune moment.[1] The
| ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos (khronos) and
| kairos. The former refers to chronological or sequential
| time, while the latter signifies a proper or opportune time
| for action. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a
| qualitative, permanent nature."
|
| Whereas actually, from Greek speakers here, the difference is
| that chronos is when you say "it's taking a long time", and
| kairos is when you say "it's time for lunch". All that
| "proper or opportune time for action"? "Qualitative,
| permanent nature"? That is a very specialized usage, mostly
| used in foreign languages.
| d_tr wrote:
| In modern Greek we also use a lot of composite words with
| the word "kairos" in them, so all that is actually still
| "alive" in these. For example, we translate "opportunity"
| as "eukairia", which is a female noun. Then there is the
| more negatively loaded male noun "kairoskopos" for the word
| "opportunist". Or "polukairismenos" for "timeworn", the
| adjective "kairios" for "well-timed" or "crucial" depending
| on context, and more.
|
| The same holds for other "loaded" ancient Greek words.
| bobthechef wrote:
| Huh?
|
| I wonder what you'd say about logos.
| greatNespresso wrote:
| Couldn't agree more on this
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| That'd be a neat name for an operating system KairOS.
| agumonkey wrote:
| granted win95 codename was cairo
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Too close to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
| khimaros wrote:
| or perhaps a realtime operating system named KaiROS?
| carvking wrote:
| Any talk of Kairos should include John Vervaeke - Awakening from
| the meaning crisis.
|
| https://youtu.be/FvLe4BuU-NM?t=2877
| https://youtu.be/Jbwm03djuJc?t=34
| gulda wrote:
| The book publisher:
|
| https://editorialkairos.com/
|
| was founded inspired by the concept
| unknown_apostle wrote:
| God desires that we make our own choices and then we are shown
| that reality is still constructed in such a way that all this
| freedom and these choices intersect to serve his timing.
| marton78 wrote:
| This word was featured prominently in the first sentence of
| former German foreign minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg's PhD
| thesis, which turned out to have been plagiarized.
| ttepasse wrote:
| Someone did a semi-dramatic reading of that preface, making him
| sound even more like a prick:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nez2BdCqVA
| kosasbest wrote:
| Seems like a synonym for _Opportunism_ or getting in early to
| something that will be a success as it grows in the future. See
| also: Early Adoption.
|
| Think of the Dotcom boom when people were snapping up three
| letter .com domains and retiring early after selling them.
| blowski wrote:
| Fascinating, I love checking HN on Sundays for these more obscure
| topics that pop up.
|
| Was it primarily used only in formal language? Or if it was used
| as everyday language, is there any evidence that it affected the
| way they saw time, in a Sapir-Whorf type way?
| nerdponx wrote:
| I'd argue that there's no reason that these two ideas should be
| conflated in the same word. Surely languages other than ancient
| Greek make this distinction?
| kyriakos wrote:
| It's still used with both meanings in Greek.
| blowski wrote:
| Oh that's interesting too. So if I said "it's time for
| lunch", would that be kairos or chronos?
| icybox wrote:
| If you check your watch, see it's 12.00 and say it, it's
| chronos. If you're hungry, it's kairos.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Not exactly but you can use it to say "as time goes by" or
| "it's time for isolation" (in the context of covid for
| example). It doesn't describe an instant in time but a
| period.
| blowski wrote:
| So "it's time for us to invest in the economy" would be
| kairos?
| kyriakos wrote:
| Yes
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| The word is still used in modern Greek to denote time. For
| example, you can say "kairos na kopso to tsigaro" to say that
| it's a good time for you to quit smoking.
|
| And just for laughs, Greece being a country driven by tourism has
| many people who would attempt to communicate with tourists in
| English. As such, we have humorous mistranslations poking fun in
| those who try to speak English by translating the Greek phrase
| word for word, like "do you have weather for coffee?" because the
| Greek sentence is "ekheis kairo gia kaphe;" which can also easily
| be interpreted as "can you find an opening in your schedule to go
| for a cup of coffee with me?"
| sm4rk0 wrote:
| It's similar in Serbian (and Croat) - the word for "time",
| "vreme" also means "weather":
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vreme#Serbo-Croatian
| rcthompson wrote:
| I wonder if the English words tempest and temporal have the
| same word root. (Edit: Indeed, I see someone posted this
| exact example in another comment thread.)
| sergioisidoro wrote:
| Same thing for Portuguese "tempo"
| dawkins wrote:
| And Spanish
| frabert wrote:
| Italian too
| [deleted]
| JMKwins wrote:
| French
| Kankuro wrote:
| And following a great national tradition of low
| proficiency in English, former French president Sarkozy
| once welcomed Angela Merkel with "sorry for the time".
| kiliancs wrote:
| And Catalan.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| celebrities are just like us /s
| [deleted]
| Case81 wrote:
| Exact same word in Romanian, huh
| bandie91 wrote:
| same in Hungarian: ido = time, weather. and in Latin and in
| many roman languages.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I love when different languages use one word to mean seemingly
| unrelated (or at most tangentially related) things, but in the
| same way.
|
| In French the word for time is also used for weather, e.g. "Le
| temps est nuageux" is "The weather is cloudy" and "Y a-t-il
| assez de temps" is "Is there enough time?".
| forty wrote:
| Apparently this double meaning also already existed in Latin
| (tempus) so it must have spreaded to many languages after
| that (both from the Greek and Latin roots)
| Grieving wrote:
| Another one that stuck with me is that "matsu" in Japanese
| matches both English senses of "pine": the pine tree, or
| being consumed with longing.
| VRay wrote:
| Those are different words with different kanji
|
| Song - pine tree
|
| Dai tsu - wait
|
| Japanese has a ludicrous number of homophones and words
| that sound like homophones to non-native speakers, so I
| dunno if there's much advantage to digging into them
| Grieving wrote:
| Yeah, it's not quite the same situation, but it's an
| interesting synchronicity. They're technically different
| words in English as well, but have converged in
| pronunciation and spelling. It's not just a random set of
| homophones, but served as a pun in the title of
| _Matsukaze_. It 's as though the "nothing" in _Much Ado
| About Nothing_ just happened to have all of the same
| double-meanings in Japanese as in Elizabethan English (
| "gossip", "vagina").
| Koshkin wrote:
| Also, from an online dictionary,
|
| _tempest
|
| Middle English tempeste, borrowed from Anglo-French, going back
| to Vulgar Latin tempesta, replacing Latin tempestat-, tempestas
| "stretch of time, period, season, weather, stormy weather"_
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I've heard this explained as:
|
| chronos: what time is it?
|
| kairos: what is this time for?
| yodon wrote:
| Being "the God of the opportune moment," like Kairos, has always
| been my favorite specialization for deity.
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(page generated 2021-10-10 23:00 UTC)