User:The Epopt

'What the Heck's an “Epopt”?'

For a time I flippantly answered, “a test of a really good dictionary . . .”

epopt: A ‘beholder’; in Gr. Antiq. a person fully initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. Also transf.
1696 TOLAND Christianity not Myst. 167 The right of seeing every thing, or being Epopts. 1798 W. TAYLOR in Monthly Mag. VI. 552 Those..who obtained the insight of these revelations, called themselves Epopts, Seers, or the Initiated. 1833 Brit. Mag. III. 48 That which has made us in some sort epopts of those mysteries which are between this world and the next. 1850 GROTE Greece II. lviii. (1862) V. 183 Addressing his companions as Mysts and Epopts.
Hence e'poptic a, of or pertaining to an epopt. epoptics n. pl., e'poptist = EPOPT.
1770 LANGHORNE Plutarch's Lives, Alexander (ed. Tegg) 467 Those more secret and profound branches of science, which they call acroamatic and epoptic. 1711 tr. Werenfel's Disc. Logom. 99 Aristotle's Books of deep Learning, his Acroamaticks, Esotericks, Epopticks, and mysterious Writings. a1652 J. SMITH Sel. Disc. i. 10 Hidden mysteries in divine truth..which cannot be discerned but only by divine Epoptists.

. . . But since there aren't any of those outside of libraries any more -- and no one knows what a “library” is any more -- I suppose I should be more forthcoming. It means “one who does not watch television.”

Alexander gained from [Aristotle] not only moral and political knowledge, but was also instructed in those more secret and profound branches of science, which they call epoptic and acroamatic; and which they did not communicate to every common scholar. For when Alexander was in Asia, and received information that Aristotle had published some books, in which those points were discussed, he wrote to him a letter, on behalf of Philosophy, in which he blamed the course he had taken.

Alexander to Aristotle, prosperity.
You did wrong in publishing the acroamatic parts of science. In what shall we differ from others, if the sublimer knowledge, which we gained from you, be made common to all the world? For my part, I had rather excel the bulk of mankind in the superior parts of learning, than in the extent of power and dominion.
Farewell.
--Plutarch, in vit. Alex.

An alternative explanation, suggested by someone guessing at the meaning, is that it is based on a character created by the Scots comedian Robbie Coltrane.

Mason Boyne, Presbyterian bigot and Orange Lodge member, says to his wife, “Did you know, Morag, that if you spell ‘Pope’ backwards you get ‘Epop,’ which is a four letter word beginning with ‘E’ like ‘Evil’? You see, it's all there in the Bible if you just shoogle the letters around a bit.”

Kudos for your work on the submarine articles. They are really shaping up! -- hajhouse

Second that! The Das Boot article is really good as well! :-) --Anders Törlind

The cabal stuff you added is not really correct. See [1].

Following up on "your" Saki article and "mine" on Kipling, is Saki's Not-So Stories intended as a parody of the latter's Just So Stories? The timing seems about right....--Paul Drye

I can't find any evidence one way or the other -- but it seems plausable....

Good article on the Magic Lantern, glad to see it here. I was wondering if one was up yet when i read about it yesterday. :-) --Koyaanis Qatsi

Thanks!

Epopt, I like your work, but what you call nonsense often isn't. This is nonsense: slakh30r8tfjlk;g3u9fogur. Irrelevant, biased comments aren't nonsense. They're irrelevant, biased comments (see what I did with Tupac Shakur, taking the biased comments and making them more Wikipedic). If you delete stuff, it helps if you characterize the deleted material more specifically than "nonsense". At least that's how I see it. --TheCunctator

And as I see it, "2Pac was the greatest of all time, and continues to be. Fuck the government and all them niggaz who shot him down. Damn, they can't stand a nigga toppin the charts. Thug in Peace my nigga 'Pac." is nonsense and should be deleted -- or, better yet, replaced by a meaningful stub, which you did very well. Thank you.

It's certainly not nonsense under the meaning that it's impossible to understand. The sentiment and content of each sentence seems quite clear. It's certainly an emotional, personal, and slang-ridden message, but hardly nonsense. In fact, I used the tirades to build the article. The only reason I'm beating this dead horse is if you write "Deleted biased, slang-ridden tirade" I have a much better idea of what happened than "Deleted nonsense". If "nonsense" is, for the sake of editing, reserved for "asflg40g0k;fjh40r", it makes collaborative editing easier.

Epopt, I'm a little uncertain about the term you're using in the Dravidian race entry. Using the term "race" for an ethnic group of humans is shaky in just about all cases, but particularly in this one. From the given description, I can't see the Dravidians meeting any reasonable definition of "race".

Might it be better to move that entry to "Dravidian people" or "Dravidian ethnic group"?

Otherwise, great work on trying to sort out an entry belonging to the more messy and bias-ridden entries in the last few days. --Joakim Ziegler

Using "Dravidian ethnic group" or "Dravidian people" as the actual entry, and making "Dravidian race" a redirect seems quite reasonable to me. Redirects can be used to correct misconceptions, I'm more concerned that our actual entries are definitions that make sense. --Joakim Ziegler

Thanks, The Epopt! Finally I know why Tussionex makes me stop coughing and feel soooooo good! --MichaelTinkler, bronchitic.

I forgot to put a summary of my edit under gabbro, so decided I'd best leave you a note here: I went looking for the chemical formula for gabbro, to add to the article, and the first page I found was <http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~jill/gabbro.html>, which looks almost identical to what you've put here. What's the deal with copyright? Are you ~jill? --Vicki Rosenzweig

see talk:Gabbro

I am probably too late with this comment, but here it goes anyway: The "e" in, for example, 1e17 kg should be uppercase since the lowercase "e" stands for the base of the natural logarithm (~2.711828...). I assume what you mean by "1e17 kg" is "1 x 10¹⁷ kg" (aka 1E17 kg or 1EE17 kg). However, what "1e17 kg" literally stands for is "1 x 2.71828... x 17 kg", which is obviously not what you intended. Like I said, it already seems to be too late since there appears to be a great many examples of this. --maveric149

Hello, sorry to bother you but I accidentally deleted the Hawkeye photo you uploaded. I was on the phone and dropped something on the mouse, and hit "Esc" but the command was already sent. Koyaanis Qatsi, Tuesday, June 11, 2002

That's sounds like it would have been fun to watch. Was there a cat involved? --the Epopt

Eh, no. Just distraction because of the nature of the conversation and my general clumsiness. Thanks for reuploading. :-) Koyaanis Qatsi

Hey Epopt, you?re a sysop now and don?t have to move articles the hard way anymore. All you have to do is click on ?Move this page? which is just under ?delete this page? and follow the on-screen instructions. This feature moves the history (well, at least most of it) and creates a redirect for you automatically. It is probably best that we use this feature whenever we can instead of the old way ? a couple of newbies have gotten rather pissed after a couple of these moves because doing things the old way ?erases? their contributions. --maveric149, Friday, June 14, 2002

D'oh! --the Epopt

No problem. I had moved a several dozen articles before finding out the easy way. Hey, this "mostly harmless" guy is becoming annoying. --maveric149

He has been rendered completely harmless -- I banned him. I'll remove the ban in an hour or so. He wants a war?--The Epopt

I would have given the guy one more chance -- but I'm a push-over. An hour ban won't harm him. --maveric149

Hello again. It looks like your contribs link is broken in the same way mine is -- there is a case-sensitive bug in the software that prevents user names beginning with a lower-case letter to display "contributions of...". In this case the software is trying to list the "Contributions of The Epopt" instead of "Contributions of the Epopt". Anyway, here is the corrected link. I've placed a corrected link to my contributions at the top of my user page, you might want to do the same so that people can recognize the work you've done. This is probably a bit more important now that you are a sysop than it was before, but it is totally up to you what to do and this still isn't that important at all (just delete this message if you like the fact that people don't know). --maveric149, Sunday, June 16, 2002

Important note for all sysops: There is a bug in the administrative move feature that truncates the moved history and changes the edit times. Please do not use this feature until this bug is fixed. More information can be found in the talk of Brion VIBBER and maveric149. Thank you. --maveric149

Where did you get all the interesting info for the U-boat articles? You are creating these so fast I doubt a mere mortal could create these from scratch so fast. But then most people are faster than me at many things. :) --maveric149

I'm so happy I could eat a small force-fattened bird whole!Ortolan88

I find it hard to believe that all these countries from which the link has been removed would have no transnational issues. At least PNG has had problems with Indonesia on its western border, and Sierra Leone has had difficulties with its neighbours in connection with its own civil wars. Eclecticology, Saturday, July 13, 2002

Nonetheless, the transnational pages for those countries stated that they had no transnational issues. I see no point in keeping pages that state that they have nothing to say. --the Epopt

Those pages came from the CIA World Factbook, which may or may not have had its facts straight, as it were. What did you do with them? Redirect them? Koyaanis Qatsi

The CIA may be considered by some as an oxymoron. The transnational links were no doubt put on nation pages as teasers to encourage other Wikipedians to fill nsomething in. One would hope that our contributors would not limit their sources for this information to the CIA!! I'm always willing to pass the ball when my knowledge or time for a subject has reached its limits. Eclecticology, Sunday, July 14, 2002

I combined the all the information on the Transnational Issues pages with their parent pages, and deleted the subpages. If you feel that blank subpages should be part of the Wikipedia, then by all means recreate them. They were all identical to Sao Tome and Principe/Transnational issues except for the name of the country.

Hi there- Vegan Reich definatelty existed- I have a CD by them- the lyrics are unintentionally hilarious...

Cheers quercus robur