Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2021 August 5

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August 5

Feras Antoon's Descent

A common unsourced edit on the Feras Antoon article is regarding the person's descent, usually claimed to be Jewish, once Arabic with a source, however, it was Facebook, so that's not reliable. Can anyone find a reliable source regarding this so the issue can be totally settled? Dege31 (talk) 13:19, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

It's probably not that important, despite people trying to make it so. WP:ETHNICITY makes it clear that the relevant information in describing a person is the "the country, region, or territory, where the person is a citizen, national, or permanent resident; or, if the person is notable mainly for past events, where the person was a citizen, national, or permanent resident when the person became notable." The article currently describes him solely as "Canadian" which is sufficient for Wikipedia purposes. Whatever the nationality of his parents or grandparents or other members of his family might have been, he is a Canadian. If there are not good sources for his ancestor's places of residence, then there's no reason to include it in the article. --Jayron32 18:03, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

Are there any earlier instances of phrases about forgiveness being better than permission?

I couldn't decide if I should ask this question in Language or Humanities, so I've put it in Miscellaneous.

• In an episode of OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes, the character Dendy tells K.O. that she "noticed that it is better to ask for forgiveness than for permission" when she considered fixing Radicles's van.
• In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, one of the gargoyles says it's "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission" when Quasimodo considered leaving the cathedral to attend the Festival of Fools.

– MrPersonHumanGuy (talk) 15:15, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

According to Quote Investigator it was popularised by Grace Hopper, but the earliest known example is from a book of 1846, with a reference to Francesco Barberini (1597–1679) (though it's not clear he made the remark himself). AndrewWTaylor (talk) 15:33, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

Some sources call it "Stewart's Law of Retroaction" with no attribution, the Freakonomics blog attributes its popularization to Admiral Hopper: [1], in about 1984, but there is a print version by Arthur Bloch that dates to 1980; that may be the source of the "Stewart's Law" version. As an adage, I'd have thought it much older than the 1980s, but Google Ngrams seems to confirm that the phrase was essentially unknown prior to the late 1970s, and started to grow in popularity since then: [2]. That's just one version of the quote I searched for, playing around with the wording all yield similar results. --Jayron32 12:45, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

Kind of like a story I recall from The Joys of Yiddish that goes something like this: A tourist visiting Jerusalem is trying to find a parking space near a historic site. There's a No Parking sign, but several cars are parked there. He asks a cop, "Can I park there?" The cop says, "No." The tourist asks, "What about those others?" The cop says, "They didn't ask!" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:51, 6 August 2021 (UTC)