[HN Gopher] Kairos ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-10 23:00 UTC)