That's just unfair

Ouch. ASIDE: I should start agglomerating these into a best of slashdot or something. There exists something like that already (Seen on Slash) but that better for teh funnyz. And lots of comments require more context, though they do a pretty good job of that since i've last seen them. On with the show!

Someone makes a (slightly) ignorant comment:

Actually, "philosophy" means "love of wisdon", not "love of knowledge". While not claiming philosophical rigour about the definitions, "knowledge" is basically "acquired information", whereas "wisdom" is "applicable knowledge".

To which this guy decides to slam back...and thinks the only way to do it is to nuke it from orbit. Christ, never fuck with a guy who has intimate knowledge of Ancient Greek, and knows the Unicode for it:

That's simply incorrect. The literal translation of the Greek Sophos (Slashdot doesn't allow greek, but put & #931;& #959;& #966;& #959;& #962; [note: remove spaces if you want to actually see the greek, you weirdo] in your browser) is able, skilled or clever, and was applied as a title to those with the training to read the future from objects, as opposed to the innate ability. The word is in specific opposition to the modern term "wisdom." There isn't a word in ancient Greek for Wisdom, as they seperate between scholarly-attained internal wisdom and naturally-attained internal wisdom as two distinct topics. In Greek, scholarly wisdom is called skholastikos, and innate wisdom is referred to with the now largely forgotten word bleptor (which has largely been replaced by the Latin "vidensi" whence we retain "evident.")

A philosopher is a lover of knowlege, skill, ability, and cleverness, not a lover of wisdom, experience, or history. The word you're looking for is the extinct term "philobleptorist," which you can see in several contemporary references to Greek great minds, particularly Herotodeus, Aristotle, Anaximander, Democritus, Protagoras and so on; it's also occasionally used in the proto-Renaissance during the "omg Latin = smart" phase, and so you see it bandied about for people like Bacon, Newton and Galileo often.

By example, consider Mike Michaelmiker from WZZZ TV, John Brown from the Brown Family Farm and The Great Mage Darkcloud from Avalon. All three people are able to read the weather. Mike uses doppler radar. John uses what farmers have figured out over the last few thousand years. Darkcloud summons a demon and binds it to just go look at the future.

Mike Michaelmiker is a philosopher of weather. He understands how weather works. He understands why a tornado happens, and can evaluate data to estimate the likely upcoming weather patterns. With sufficient tools, his predictions are highly accurate in the near future. Mike doesn't need significant historical data for the local terrain; a map, some hardware and a few hours are sufficient for him to get up and going. However, without tools he cannot function.

John Brown is a philoblapterer of weather. He is aware of the historic trends for weather in the area. He knows dozens of signals from the natural world - if the air smells like metal, then an electrical storm is likely; if the air feels wet and drops rapidly in temperature, then rain is likely; if the wind seems faster at the ground than ten feet up, then local weather is about to turn from cloudy to clear. He doesn't know that the metallic smell is loose ozone from electrical interactions in the clouds, or so on; he just knows that that smell is an indicator of a well known process. With a few weeks to get a sense of the pattern and provided that his knowledge is locationally appropriate, his predictions are also highly accurate, but for completely different reasons. John is only effective in terrain he knows the history of, because even similar terrain can have radically different weather contexts, but needs no real tools other than some time.

Darkcloud is meteonephelamancia, and lord only knows how he works. The point was to distinguish between academics and learned innate knowledge. The Greeks believed that there was a block of knowledge waiting to be unlocked piecemeal inside each of us, and went as far as to distinguish that from scholastic information right in the language. Sophos is clearly knowledge of skill, not innate wisdom, by the very nature of the Greek lexicon.

The counterpart by scholarly skill is an academician; it was common but not required for a philosopher to be an academician. Counterexamples, however, include Pythagoras, who never attended a day of school in his life and proudly attested to that (people who call the Akousmatos a school are mistaken; it was a think-tank and a borderline cult. People went there to work, not to learn.) Pythagoras is remembered among other things as a great Philosopher, but it would be a mistake to call him an academic. Granted in the modern sense academic has begun to blur with researcher, but remember at that time it had not. The Chaerephon notwithstanding, Socrates is probably another philosopher which was not an academic; though what we know about him is second hand, several of his students including Plato indicate that he frequently denied accepting money for his "public conversations" which others viewed as teaching, and there is the supposition that he relied on wealthy friends, presumably Crito, Euclides and eventually Stilpo.

The counterpart by innate knowledge doesn't have a title, because you don't really get people who choose to have innate knowledge. However, when that knowledge was believed to be derived of gods or powerful beings, these people were called Oracles from the Greek "orare" to pray or plead. Otherwise, it would be typically referred to as a magician with respect to some specific topic, rather than as a group, such as sciomantia - someone who speaks with shadows and shades (the idea of referring to them as dead is modern, since referring to a dead creature as dead back then was taboo and believed to be a good way to get haunted, so you never would have heard necromantia.) By the way, -mantia has turned into the modern "-mancy," whence we get rhabdomancer, pyromancer, osteomancer and so on.

They believed in all sorts of weird divinations, and as such referred to them almost like professions; they had, say, leatherworkers and ironworkers, but no word for tradesmen, by metaphor. (That is, there were arithmantia and alectryomantia and oneiromantia, but no generic "mantia.") My favorite is gyromantia. It's funnier than it sounds; look it up.

By the by, the myth that sophia comes from wisdom comes from the mistranslation applied in the 1600s by someone in reference to Hippocrates' identification of what we now call Wisdom Teeth as "sophronisteres," or teeth which come in once the person is characterized of self-control (adult teeth, in the modern vernacular; the ancients would call us intensely age-discriminatory.)

At any rate, don't argue with people because someone told you something. That someone is frequently wrong, and the person you're arguing with frequently isn't. Argue with other people only when you know the specifics, which in the case of etymology means the particular path the word has taken to get to where it is today. It is especially important to not argue the meanings of words in a language you apparently don't speak.

The best thing about arguing the definitions of words in ancient Greek is that you can't pull the "well that's what it means today because there are a lot of people making the same mistake" routine.