

Eating to Live or Living to Eat? - grellas
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704288204575363072381955744.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLESecondNews

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hugh3
_Scholars have understood the different motives for eating as far back as
Socrates, who counseled, "Thou shouldst eat to live, not live to eat."_

No he didn't, he said... something in Greek. Why does the Wall St Journal feel
the need to use a translation into faux-archaic English?

~~~
balding_n_tired
It beateth me.

In their defense, most of who had to scour our brains for a quotation relating
to Socrates would probably come up with "Know thyself", and would have to make
a conscious effort to say "yourself."

~~~
sprout
As djacobs also pointed out, "Know thyself" is likely a more faithful
translation than "Know yourself." Thy is the familiar form of "your."

It passed out of favor after Cromwell's Commonwealth. Under the puritans,
everyone was all thee and thou to each other, under the belief that we were
all 'family' in Christ, and distancing yourself by using the formal 'your' was
unchristian. Then after the commonwealth fell the pendulum swung the other way
and people stopped using it altogether.

But in any case, I'd imagine Socrates was in fact using it, so that is likely
the best translation into English, even if it sounds archaic.

~~~
dkarl
"Your" is the familiar form of "your" in the major English dialects spoken
today, and there's no good reason to use a different one. Socrates did say it
a long time ago, and "thy" has a long-ago flavor, but evoking the world of
Shakespearean England (or modern-day pockets of Scotland) does not provide
helpful context for a quote from Greece 2500 years ago.

~~~
djacobs
No, I don't believe that's correct. Thou is intimate, you is formal.

~~~
dkarl
Try using "thou" in an intimate situation, and your partner will be waiting
for a Holy Grail punchline....

But seriously, "thou" just doesn't exist in modern English for the vast
majority of English speakers on the planet. They use "thou" when they're
quoting or reciting older texts, or when they want to make something new sound
like something old. For instance, someone writing a prayer might sprinkle it
with "thee" and "thou" to mimic the prayers and scriptures he's familiar with,
because it puts him in a religious frame of mind. People who do that kind of
thing tend to be inconsistent (just like when people use mock-archaic language
for comedic purposes) and their usage would probably defy grammatical
description.

~~~
djacobs
Okay, I'll try this approach.

"You" is both intimate and formal today for native English speakers. There is
no distinction between the two cases.

For the Greeks and Early Modern English and really everyone except "modern"
native English speakers, there is a distinction between the two, and "thou" is
the closest translation we have. Much as you might not like it, it is not
incorrect to translate another language's intimate second-person pronoun into
English as "thou" because, in fact, that is the closest approximation we have.

Or, if you prefer, we could start saying "You-familiar should know you-
familiar's self."

~~~
dkarl
There's no graceful way to make the distinction in modern English, and the
distinction isn't important to the phrase being translated. Why go out of your
way to preserve it, to the extent of using awkward or archaic language?

"Know yourself" doesn't have the ring of authority and solemnity that "Know
thyself" does, but when you think about _why_ "Know thyself" sounds that way
to an English speaker, it doesn't make any sense at all to exploit that
connotation. (That is, unless Socrates himself would have approved of
exploiting religiously tinged language to bypass rational skepticism. That
doesn't sound like the Socrates I've heard about, but I must confess that I
know Socrates mostly by reputation.)

Different languages make many different distinctions, and translations are
inevitably lossy. Translation would be an impossible job if translators didn't
feel free to drop distinctions that, in their view, aren't essential to the
meaning of the text.

For example, in a Spanish news article about a criminal's appearance in court,
the gender of the criminal's lawyer might be evident, but if the lawyer is not
mentioned by name, the lawyer's gender would probably not be evident in the
English translation. There's nothing wrong with that, unless there happens to
be some special reason why the lawyer's gender is relevant to the story.

------
keefe
"Simply seeing pictures of tempting food can light up the pleasure-seeking
areas of obese peoples' brains."

It's important not to infer causation from correlation. We can't assume that
obese people can't stop eating because of this kind of reaction in the brain.

I'm sure if you showed a pothead weed, an alcoholic gin, or a cokehead coke
then you'd see parts of their brain light up, because that is how their habits
have been built, but this activity could be the result of long term bad habits
as much as the cause of such habits.

~~~
zargon
"It's possible that these changes reflect how the brain has adapted to eating
patterns in obese people, and that could create a vicious circle, putting them
at risk for even more disordered eating," says Dr. Small.

~~~
keefe
...says Dr. Small...

