Kairos | Hacker News Reader

Kairos

en.wikipedia.org

235 pointstosh69 comments

The word is still used in modern Greek to denote time. For example, you can say "καιρός να κόψω το τσιγάρο" 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 "έχεις καιρό για καφέ;" which can also easily be interpreted as "can you find an opening in your schedule to go for a cup of coffee with me?"

It's similar in Serbian (and Croat) - the word for "time", "vreme" also means "weather": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vreme#Serbo-Croatian

Same thing for Portuguese "tempo"

And Spanish

Italian too

French

And Catalan.

celebrities are just like us /s

And following a great national tradition of low proficiency in English, former French president Sarkozy once welcomed Angela Merkel with "sorry for the time".

Exact same word in Romanian, huh

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.)

same in Hungarian: idő = time, weather. and in Latin and in many roman languages.

Same in Bulgarian.

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?".

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)

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.

Those are different words with different kanji

松 - pine tree

待つ - 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

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").

Also, from an online dictionary,

tempest

Middle English tempeste, borrowed from Anglo-French, going back to Vulgar Latin tempesta, replacing Latin tempestāt-, tempestās “stretch of time, period, season, weather, stormy weather”

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?

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?

It's still used with both meanings in Greek.

Oh that's interesting too. So if I said "it's time for lunch", would that be kairos or chronos?

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.

So "it's time for us to invest in the economy" would be kairos?

Yes

If you check your watch, see it's 12.00 and say it, it's chronos. If you're hungry, it's kairos.

For instantaneous time you would say ώρα, not χρόνος. "Τι ώρα είναι;" = what time is it, lit. "what is the hour". Χρόνος for me implies a span of time, not a single moment

Yep. "It takes time" = "παίρνει χρόνο". "It's time for lunch" = "είναι ώρα για μεσημεριανό" (or, less commonly, "είναι καιρός για μεσημεριανό").

It's time for lunch would idiomatically be something like "ήρθε η ώρα να φάμε μεσημεριανό" (it came the hour for us to eat lunch). For instantaneous time you use hour (ώρα) or στιγμή (moment). So there's actually three "temporal terms" in Greek, ώρα, χρόνος and καιρός. In my head καιρός is the "longest" of the three (describing a period rather than an instant), and ώρα and χρόνος are sort of depending on context. Ώρα is used in contexts like "δεν είναι η κατάλληλη ώρα για αυτό" (it's not the right time for that), where you could replace it with "moment" in english (στιγμή). Χρόνος is the least frequently used in the modern language I would say, and is mostly associated with abstract notions of time as a concept (e.g. "the passage of time") but also in specific terms like "I don't have time for that" (δεν έχω χρόνο για αυτό).

All of these words overlap somewhat so it gets somewhat confusing to describe to a non-native speaker, other than saying that generally a native speaker will be able to tell if the use of one of the three "feels right" in a certain context or not. Also several of these terms have additional meanings! For example, ώρα is also literally hour (είναι τρεις η ώρα = it's three o'clock, literally "3 is the hour"), χρόνος also can mean "year" (για έναν χρόνο = for one chronos = for one year), etc. etc.

"Καιρός" is used (apart from the word for "weather") very much exactly how the article describes it, ie the opportune moment for something. E.g. "είναι καιρός για δράση" (it is the right time for action), "δεν ήρθε ακόμα ο καιρός του" (it's not the right time yet) and found in words like "εύκαιρος" (opportune, ie of the right time). "Καίριος" means timely, arriving just at the right moment.

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...

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

Madeline L’Engle also wrote of Kairos and Chronos in her various books. A Wrinkle in Time and the subsequent three books are called the Time Quartet. The Time Quartet deals with tesseracts, wormholes, and larger universal and existential themes, in what she calls “pure time,” AKA Kairos.

Contrast this with her “normal world” books that take place in the “regular, clock-time” world, AKA Chronos.

A Wrinkle in Time probably shaped my view of the world more than any other book growing up. Kairos has a permanent place in my heart as a result.

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.

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".

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.

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

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.

Someone did a semi-dramatic reading of that preface, making him sound even more like a prick:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nez2BdCqVA

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.

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?

That the article poses the philosophical works as being part of the definition of the word.

From the opening:

"Kairos (Ancient Greek: καιρός) is an Ancient Greek word meaning the right, critical, or opportune moment.[1] The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos (χρόνος) 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.

In modern Greek we also use a lot of composite words with the word "καιρός" in them, so all that is actually still "alive" in these. For example, we translate "opportunity" as "ευκαιρία", which is a female noun. Then there is the more negatively loaded male noun "καιροσκόπος" for the word "opportunist". Or "πολυκαιρισμένος" for "timeworn", the adjective "καίριος" for "well-timed" or "crucial" depending on context, and more.

The same holds for other "loaded" ancient Greek words.

Huh?

I wonder what you'd say about λόγος.

my first thought as well.

One can argue that Christian teology is older than modern Greek, therefore gravity of Logos is stronger than anywhere else

Couldn't agree more on this

In this case, it's not. We really do use "kairos" to mean "the opportune moment". It's not about instant versus durable, it's never kairos for something that's not supposed to happen now, no matter how instant.

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.

Incidentally, it's also a rather unique and absolutely superb red wine from northern Italy.

https://www.zyme.it/en/prodotti/kairos

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.

This is like how German has the words "Bürste" and "Pinsel".

Bürste is a brush that one might use for scrubbing, while Pinsel is a paintbrush, usually with a pointed tip.

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 Bürste and Norwegian børste 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.

Ribbonfarm's take on kairos vs chronos: "internal and external clocks [...] individual time and social time, sensed time and read time [...] Bergsonian vs Einsteinian time." And now things that used be synchronized are becoming async, chronological time is bleeding into kairological time.

https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/stream-time

Being "the God of the opportune moment," like Kairos, has always been my favorite specialization for deity.

That'd be a neat name for an operating system KairOS.

or perhaps a realtime operating system named KaiROS?

Too close to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

granted win95 codename was cairo

I've heard this explained as:

chronos: what time is it?

kairos: what is this time for?

The book publisher:

https://editorialkairos.com/

was founded inspired by the concept