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Sidney Poitier

Sidney Poitier (February 20, 1927 – January 6, 2022) was a Bahamian–American actor, film director, and diplomat. In 1964, he was the first Black actor and first Bahamian to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. He received two competitive Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, and a Grammy Award as well as nominations for two Emmy Awards and a Tony Award. In 1999, he was ranked among the "American Film Institute's 100 Stars". Poitier was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.

Poitier's family lived in the Bahamas, then still a Crown colony, but he was born in Miami, Florida, while they were visiting, which automatically granted him U.S. citizenship. He grew up in the Bahamas, but moved to Miami at age 15, and to New York City when he was 16. He joined the American Negro Theatre, landing his breakthrough film role as a high school student in the film Blackboard Jungle (1955). Poitier gained stardom for his leading roles in films such as The Defiant Ones (1958) for which he made history becoming the first African American to receive an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination. Additionally Poitier won the Silver Bear for Best Actor for his performance. In 1964, he won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963).

Poitier broke ground playing strong leading African American male roles in films such as Porgy and Bess (1959), A Raisin in the Sun (1961), and A Patch of Blue (1965). He acted in three films in 1967 films which dealt with issues of race and race relations: To Sir, with Love; Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night, the latter of which earned him Golden Globe and BAFTA Award nominations. In a poll the next year he was voted the US's top box-office star. Poitier made his directorial film debut with Buck and the Preacher (1972) followed by A Warm December (1973), Uptown Saturday Night (1974), and Stir Crazy (1980). He later starred in Shoot to Kill (1988) and Sneakers (1992).

Poitier was granted an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974. He received numerous honors including the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1982, the Kennedy Center Honor in 1995, Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1999, and the Honorary Academy Award in 2002. In 2009, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. In 2016, he was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship for outstanding lifetime achievement in film. From 1997 to 2007, he was the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan.

Early life
Sidney Poitier was born on February 20, 1927, in Miami, Florida. He was the youngest of seven children born to Evelyn (Outten) and Reginald James Poitier, Afro-Bahamian farmers who owned a farm on Cat Island. The family would travel to Miami to sell tomatoes and other produce to wholesalers. His father also worked as a cab driver in Nassau. Poitier was born unexpectedly in Miami while his parents were there on business; his birth was two months premature, and he was not expected to survive, but his parents remained in Miami for three months to nurse him to health. Poitier grew up in the Bahamas, then a British Crown colony. His birth in the United States entitled him to US citizenship.

Although there were few Poitiers of French ancestry in the Bahamas, some believe that the Poitier ancestors had migrated from Haiti, and were probably among the runaway slaves who established maroon communities throughout the Bahamas, including Cat Island. There had, however, been one Poitier of French ancestry on Cat Island, planter Charles Leonard Poitier, who had immigrated from Jamaica in the early 1800s, possibly originally from Haiti. In 1834, following the abolition of slavery, 86 slaves from his wife's estate kept the Poitier name.

Poitier lived with his family on Cat Island until he was ten, when they moved to Nassau. There he was exposed to the modern world, where he saw his first automobile and first experienced electricity, plumbing, refrigeration, and motion pictures. He was raised Catholic but later became an agnostic with views closer to deism.

At age fifteen, in 1942, he was sent to Miami to live with his brother's large family, but Poitier found it impossible to adjust to the racism in Jim Crow era Florida. At sixteen, he moved to New York City, looking to become an actor, holding a string of jobs as a dishwasher in the meantime. After failing his first audition with the American Negro Theatre due to his inability to fluently read the script, an elderly Jewish waiter sat with him every night for several months, helping him to improve his reading by using the newspaper. During World War II, in November 1943, he lied about his age (he was only 16 at the time) and enlisted in the Army. He was assigned to a Veteran's Administration hospital in Northport, New York, and was trained to work with psychiatric patients. Poitier became upset with how the hospital treated its patients and feigned mental illness to obtain a discharge. Poitier confessed to a psychiatrist that he was faking his condition, but the doctor was sympathetic and granted his discharge under Section VIII of Army regulation 615–360 in December 1944.

After leaving the Army, he worked as a dishwasher until a successful audition landed him a role in an American Negro Theatre production, the same company he failed his first audition with.

1947–1957: Early work and blacklist
Poitier joined the American Negro Theater but was rejected by audiences. Contrary to what was expected of black actors at the time, Poitier's tone deafness made him unable to sing. Determined to refine his acting skills and rid himself of his noticeable Bahamian accent, he spent the next six months dedicating himself to achieving theatrical success. He modeled his legendary speech pattern after radio personality Norman Brokenshire. On his second attempt at the theater, he was noticed and given a leading role in the Broadway production of Lysistrata, through which, though it ran a failing four days, he received an invitation to understudy for Anna Lucasta. Poitier would later befriend Harry Belafonte at the American Negro Theater.

In 1947, Poitier was a founding member of the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA), an organization whose participants were committed to a left-wing analysis of class and racial exploitation. Among his other CNA-related activities, in the early 1950s he was a Vice Chair of the organization. In 1952, he was one of several narrators in a pageant written by Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry for the Negro History Festival put on by the leftist Harlem monthly newspaper Freedom.

His participation in such events and CNA generally, along with his friendships with other leftist Black performers, including Canada Lee and Paul Robeson, led to his subsequent blacklisting for a few years. Even associating with Poitier added to the basis for blacklisting Alfred Palca, the writer and producer of one of Poitier's earliest films, the 1954 Go Man Go. Poitier never did sign a loyalty oath, despite being asked in connection with his prospective role in Blackboard Jungle (1955).

By late 1949, Poitier had to choose between leading roles on stage and an offer to work for Darryl F. Zanuck in the film No Way Out (1950). His performance in No Way Out, as a doctor treating a white bigot (played by Richard Widmark, who became a friend), was noticed and led to more roles, each considerably more interesting and more prominent than those most African-American actors of the time were offered. In 1951, he traveled to South Africa with the African-American actor Canada Lee to star in the film version of Cry, the Beloved Country. Poitier's distinction continued in his role as Gregory W. Miller, a member of an incorrigible high-school class in Blackboard Jungle (1955). But it was his performance in Martin Ritt's 1957 film Edge of the City that the industry could not ignore. It was a pitch towards stardom granted him.

Poitier enjoyed working for director William Wellman on Good-bye, My Lady (1956). Wellman was a big name, he had previously directed the famous Roxie Hart (1942) with Ginger Rogers and Magic Town (1947) with James Stewart. What Poitier remembered indelibly was the wonderful humanity in this talented director. Wellman had a sensitivity that Poitier thought was profound, which Wellman felt he needed to hide." Poitier later praised Wellman for inspiring his thoughtful approach to directing when he found himself taking the helm from Joseph Sargent on Buck and the Preacher in 1971.

1958–1969: Breakthrough and stardom
In 1958 he starred alongside Tony Curtis in director Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones. The film was a critical and commercial success with the performances of both Poitier and Curtis being praised. The film landed eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Actor nominations for both stars, making Poitier the first Black male actor to be nominated for a competitive Academy Award as best actor. Poitier did win the British Academy Film Award for Best Foreign Actor.

Poitier acted in the first production of A Raisin in the Sun alongside Ruby Dee on the Broadway stage at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1959. The play was directed by Lloyd Richards. The play introduced details of Black life to the overwhelmingly White Broadway audiences, while director Richards observed that it was the first play to which large numbers of Black people were drawn. The play was a groundbreaking piece of American theater with Frank Rich, critic from The New York Times writing in 1983, that A Raisin in the Sun "changed American theater forever". For his performance he earned a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play nomination. That same year Poitier would star in the film adaptation of Porgy and Bess (1959) alongside Dorothy Dandridge. For his performance, Poitier received a 1960 Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy.

In 1961, Poitier starred in the film adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun for which he received another Golden Globe Award nomination. Also in 1961, Poitier starred in Paris Blues alongside Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Louis Armstrong, and Diahann Carroll. The film dealt with the American racism of the time by contrasting it with Paris's open acceptance of Black people. In 1963 he starred in Lilies of the Field. For this role, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor and became the first Black male to win the award. His satisfaction at this honor was undermined by his concerns that this award was more of the industry congratulating itself for having him as a token and it would inhibit him from asking for more substantive considerations afterward. Poitier worked relatively little over the following year; he remained the only major actor of African descent and the roles offered were predominantly typecast as a soft-spoken appeaser.

In 1964, Poitier recorded an album with the composer Fred Katz called Poitier Meets Plato, in which Poitier recites passages from Plato's writings. He also performed in the Cold War drama The Bedford Incident (1965) alongside the film's producer Richard Widmark, the Biblical epic film The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) alongside Charlton Heston and Max von Sydow, and A Patch of Blue (1965) co-starring Elizabeth Hartman and Shelley Winters.

In 1967, he was the most successful draw at the box office, the commercial peak of his career, with three popular films, To Sir, with Love, and In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Although these three films seemingly shared little similarity, they all, albeit not overtly, dealt with the black and white divide. In To Sir, with Love, Poitier plays a teacher at a secondary school in the East End of London. The film deals with social and racial issues in the inner city school. The film was met with mixed response; however, Poitier was praised for his performance, with the critic from Time writing, "Even the weak moments are saved by Poitier, who invests his role with a subtle warmth."

In Norman Jewison's mystery drama In the Heat of the Night, Poitier played Virgil Tibbs, a police detective from Philadelphia who investigates a murder in the Deep South in Mississippi alongside a cop with racial prejudices played by Rod Steiger. The film was a critical success with Bosley Crowther of The New York Times calling it "the most powerful film I have seen in a long time." Roger Ebert placed it at number ten on his top ten list of 1967 films. Art Murphy of Variety felt that the excellent Poitier and outstanding Steiger performances overcame noteworthy flaws, including an uneven script. Poitier received a Golden Globe Award and British Academy Film Award nomination for his performance.

In Stanley Kramer's social drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Poitier played a man in a relationship with a White woman played by Katharine Houghton. The film revolves around her bringing him to meet with her parents played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The film was one of the rare films at the time to depict an interracial romance in a positive light, as interracial marriage historically had been illegal in most states of the United States. It was still illegal in 17 states—mostly Southern states—until June 12, 1967, six months before the film was released. The film was a critical and financial success. In his film review, Roger Ebert described Poitier's character as "a noble, rich, intelligent, handsome, ethical medical expert" and that the film "is a magnificent piece of entertainment. It will make you laugh and may even make you cry." To win his role as Dr. Prentice in the film, Poitier had to audition for Tracy and Hepburn at two separate dinner parties.

Poitier began to be criticized for being typecast as over-idealized African-American characters who were not permitted to have any sexuality or personality faults, such as his character in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Poitier was aware of this pattern himself but was conflicted on the matter. He wanted more varied roles; but he also felt obliged to set an example with his characters, by challenging old stereotypes, as he was the only major actor of African descent being cast in leading roles in the American film industry at the time. For instance, in 1966, he turned down an opportunity to play the lead in an NBC television production of Othello with that spirit in mind. Despite this, many of the films in which Poitier starred during the 1960s would later be cited as social thrillers by both filmmakers and critics.

1970–1989: Transition to directing
In the Heat of the Night featured his most successful character, Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, detective whose subsequent career was the subject of two sequels: They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970) and The Organization (1971).

In 1972 he made his feature film directorial debut, the Western Buck and the Preacher, in which Poitier also starred, alongside Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee. Poitier replaced the original director, Joseph Sargent. The following year he directed his second feature, the romantic drama A Warm December. Poitier also starred in the film alongside Esther Anderson.

Along with Barbra Streisand and Paul Newman, Poitier formed First Artists Production Company so actors could secure properties and develop movie projects for themselves. Working with First Artists, Poitier directed several financially successful comedy films, including three in which he also starred: Uptown Saturday Night (1974) with Bill Cosby and Harry Belafonte; and Let's Do It Again (1975) and A Piece of the Action (1977), both with Cosby. His most successful comedy was Stir Crazy (1980; not a First Artists production), starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, which for many years was the highest-grossing film directed by a person of African descent.

In 1985, he directed Fast Forward and, in 1990, he reunited with Cosby directing him in the family comedy Ghost Dad.

In 1988, he starred in Shoot to Kill with Tom Berenger. In 1992, he starred in Sneakers with Robert Redford and Dan Aykroyd. In 1997, he co-starred in The Jackal with Richard Gere and Bruce Willis.

1990–2022: Later work
In the 1990s, he starred in several well received television movies and miniseries such as Separate but Equal (1991), To Sir, with Love II (1996), Mandela and de Klerk (1997), and The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn (1999). He received Emmy nominations for his work in Separate but Equal and Mandela and de Klerk, as well as a Golden Globe nomination for the former. He won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2001.

In 2002, Poitier received the 2001 Honorary Academy Award for his overall contribution to American cinema. Later in the ceremony, Denzel Washington won the award for Best Actor for his performance in Training Day, becoming the second Black actor to win the award. In his victory speech, Washington saluted Poitier by saying "I'll always be chasing you, Sidney. I'll always be following in your footsteps. There's nothing I would rather do, sir."

With the death of Ernest Borgnine in 2012, Poitier became the oldest living recipient of the Academy Award for Best Actor. On March 2, 2014, Poitier appeared with Angelina Jolie at the 86th Academy Awards to present the Best Director Award. He was given a standing ovation and Jolie thanked him for all his Hollywood contributions, stating: "We are in your debt." Poitier gave a brief speech, telling his peers to "keep up the wonderful work" to warm applause. In 2021, the academy dedicated the lobby of the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles as the "Sidney Poitier Grand Lobby" in his honor.

Board and diplomatic service
From 1995 to 2003, Poitier served as a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company.

In April 1997, Poitier was appointed ambassador from the Bahamas to Japan, a position he held until 2007. From 2002 to 2007, he was concurrently the ambassador of the Bahamas to UNESCO.

Personal life
Poitier was first married to Juanita Hardy from April 29, 1950, until 1965. Though Poitier became a resident of Mount Vernon in Westchester County, New York, in 1956, they raised their family in Stuyvesant, New York, in a house on the Hudson River. In 1959, Poitier began a nine-year affair with actress Diahann Carroll. On January 23, 1976, he married Joanna Shimkus, a Canadian actress who starred with Poitier in The Lost Man in 1969, and they remained married until his death. Poitier had four daughters with his first wife: Beverly, Pamela, Sherri, and Gina. He had two daughters with his second wife: Anika and Sydney Tamiia. Poitier had eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. When Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas in September 2019, Poitier's family had 23 missing relatives.

Death
On January 6, 2022, Poitier died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of 94. His death was confirmed by Fred Mitchell, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Bahamas. According to a copy of his death certificate obtained by TMZ, the cause of death was cardiopulmonary failure, with Alzheimer's disease and prostate cancer listed as underlying causes.

Upon Poitier's death, many people released statements honoring him, including President Joe Biden, who wrote in part: "With unflinching grandeur and poise – his singular warmth, depth, and stature on-screen – Sidney helped open the hearts of millions and changed the way America saw itself." Former president Barack Obama paid tribute to Poitier, calling him "a singular talent who epitomized dignity and grace". Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton also released statements.

Many people in the entertainment industry also paid tribute to Poitier, including Martin Scorsese who wrote, "For years, the spotlight was on Sidney Poitier. He had a vocal precision and physical power and grace that at moments seemed almost supernatural." Harry Belafonte, Morgan Freeman, Viola Davis, Whoopi Goldberg, Lupita Nyong'o, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, Oprah Winfrey, Octavia Spencer, Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Esposito, Quincy Jones, Michael Eisner, Ron Howard and others also paid tribute. Broadway paid tribute when its theaters dimmed their lights on January 19, 2022, at 7:45 pm ET.

The Ebertfest film festival announced it would be dedicating its 2022 event to the memory of Poitier and Gilbert Gottfried.

Acting credits and accolades

Poitier became the first Black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963). He also received a Grammy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and a British Academy Film Award. He received numerous honoraries during his lifetime including the Academy Honorary Award for his lifetime achievement in film in 2001. In 1992, Poitier received the AFI Life Achievement Award. In 1994, Poitier received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1981, he received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award and in 2016 he received the BAFTA Fellowship. In 2022, he was inducted into the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum.

In 1995, he received the Kennedy Center Honor and in 2009, Poitier was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama. He was also named an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974. In 1986, he gave the Commencement Address to the University of Miami graduating class and was given the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Fine Arts.

Legacy
Poitier was described as an icon in his obituary by USA Today. Laura Jacobs for Vanity Fair hailed Poitier as the "Martin Luther King Jr. of the movies". Several film historians and journalists have called him Hollywood's first African-American film star. The New York Times noted after his death, that Poitier was instrumental for the diversity of Hollywood and "paved the way for Black actors in film". The Hollywood Reporter wrote that "Poitier was the first actor to star in mainstream Hollywood movies that depicted a Black man in a non-stereotypical fashion, and his influence, especially during the 1950s and '60s as role model and image-maker, was immeasurable."

While presenting Poitier the Honorary Academy Award in 2002, Denzel Washington said of Poitier: "Before Sidney, African American actors had to take supporting roles in major studio films that were easy to cut out in certain parts of the country. But you couldn't cut Sidney Poitier out of a Sidney Poitier picture". He was an influential African-American actor and highly viewed as such as he became the first Black actor to be nominated for an Academy Award and the first Black male actor to win the award. He was also described as the "sole representative" of African-Americans in mainstream cinema during the 1950s and 1960s, especially during the height of the American Civil Rights movement. The New York Times noted that Poitier was "an ambassador to white America and a benign emblem of Black power". For his role in diversifying Hollywood and for his role in paving the way for further Black actors, he was described as one of "the most important figures of 20th century Hollywood".

Former president of the United States Barack Obama noted that Poitier had "[advanced] the nation's dialogue on race and respect" and "opened doors for a generation of actors".

Sidney, a documentary film about Poitier's life and legacy by Reginald Hudlin, was released on September 23, 2022.

Works about Poitier
Autobiographies Poitier wrote three autobiographical books:
 * This Life (1980)
 * The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (2000)
 * Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter (2008, an Oprah's Book Club selection)

Biographies
 * Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon (2004) by historian Aram Goudsouzian.
 * Sidney Poitier Black and White: Sidney Poitier's Emergence in the 1960s as a Black Icon (2020) by Philip Powers.

Other works

Poitier wrote the novel Montaro Caine (2013).

Documentaries
 * Sidney Poitier: One Bright Light (2000)
 * Sidney Poitier, un outsider à Hollywood (2008)
 * Sidney (2022)

In popular culture
The play and film, Six Degrees of Separation, is about a young Black man named Paul, who cons a white, wealthy Manhattan couple living in a swanky home overlooking Central Park. Paul shows up at their home claiming to be friends with the couple's children at Harvard, but indicates he is in town to meet his father, Sidney Poitier. Paul charms the couple with glowing tales of his celebrity father, whom he indicates is in New York directing a film version of the Broadway musical, Cats. The original play of Six Degrees of Separation premiered in 1990 in New York. It has starred actors including Stockard Channing and Courtney B. Vance. The 1993 film of Six Degrees of Separation starred Stockard Channing, Will Smith and Donald Sutherland. The play and film were inspired by David Hampton, a real life con-man who had claimed to be the son of Sidney Poitier.

title: Sidney Poitier


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Human resources

Human resources (HR) is the set of people who make up the workforce of an organization, business sector, industry, or economy. A narrower concept is human capital, the knowledge and skills which the individuals command. Similar terms include manpower, labor, labor-power, or personnel.

The Human Resources department (HR department, sometimes just called "Human Resource") of an organization performs human resource management, overseeing various aspects of employment, such as compliance with labor law and employment standards, interviewing and selection, performance management, administration of employee benefits, organizing of employee files with the required documents for future reference, and some aspects of recruitment (also known as talent acquisition), talent management, staff wellbeing, and employee offboarding. They serve as the link between an organization's management and its employees.

The duties include planning, recruitment and selection process, posting job ads, evaluating the performance of employees, organizing resumes and job applications, scheduling interviews and assisting in the process and ensuring background checks. Another job is payroll and benefits administration which deals with ensuring vacation and sick time are accounted for, reviewing payroll, and participating in benefits tasks, like claim resolutions, reconciling benefits statements, and approving invoices for payment. Human Resources also coordinates employee relations activities and programs including, but not limited to, employee counseling. The last job is regular maintenance, this job makes sure that the current HR files and databases are up to date, maintaining employee benefits and employment status and performing payroll/benefit-related reconciliations.

Activities
A human resources manager can have various functions in a company, including to:
 * Determine the needs of the staff/personnel.
 * Determine whether to use temporary staff or hire employees to fill these needs.
 * Determine do's and don'ts.
 * Train and develop management styles
 * Recruit and/or interview the best employees
 * Train employees and upgrade their learning knowledge
 * Supervise the work
 * Evaluate the work
 * Establish discipline work culture in the organization
 * Avoid politics in the office.
 * Apply HR software for the ease of work in the organization.
 * Manage employee relations. If there are unions, perform collective bargaining
 * Prepare employee records and personal policies.
 * Manage employee payroll, benefits, and compensation
 * Ensure pay equity
 * Ensure equal opportunities
 * Deal with discrimination
 * Deal with performance issues
 * Prepare remote work and hybrid work policy
 * Monitor staff care and well-being
 * Ensure that human resources practices conform to various regulations
 * Motivate employees
 * Mediate disputes
 * Disseminate information in the organization so as to benefit its growth

Managers need to develop their interpersonal skills to be effective. Organizational behavior focuses on how to improve factors that make organizations more effective.

History
Human resource management used to be referred to as "personnel administration". In the 1920s, personnel administration focused mostly on the aspects of hiring, evaluating, and compensating employees. However, they did not focus on any employment relationships at an organizational performance level or on the systematic relationships in any parties. This led to a lacked unifying paradigm in the field during this period.

According to an HR Magazine article, the first personnel management department started at the National Cash Register Co. in 1900. The owner, John Henry Patterson, organized a personnel department to deal with grievances, discharges and safety, and information for supervisors on new laws and practices after several strikes and employee lockouts. This action was followed by other companies; for example, Ford had high turnover ratios of 380 percent in 1913, but just one year later, the line workers of the company had doubled their daily salaries from $2.50 to $5, even though $2.50 was a fair wage at that time. This example clearly shows the importance of effective management which leads to a greater outcome of employee satisfaction as well as encouraging employees to work together in order to achieve better business objectives.

During the 1970s, American businesses began experiencing challenges due to the substantial increase in competitive pressures. Companies experienced globalization, deregulation, and rapid technological change which caused the major companies to enhance their strategic planning – a process of predicting future changes in a particular environment and focus on ways to promote organizational effectiveness. This resulted in developing more jobs and opportunities for people to show their skills which were directed to effectively applying employees toward the fulfillment of individual, group, and organizational goals. Many years later the major/minor of human resource management was created at universities and colleges also known as business administration. It consists of all the activities that companies used to ensure the more effective use of employees.

Now, human resources focus on the people side of management. There are two real definitions of HRM (Human Resource Management); one is that it is the process of managing people in organizations in a structured and thorough manner. This means that it covers the hiring, firing, pay and perks, and performance management. This first definition is the modern and traditional version more like what a personnel manager would have done back in the 1920s. The second definition is that HRM circles the ideas of management of people in organizations from a macromanagement perspective like customers and competitors in a marketplace. This involves the focus on making the "employment relationship" fulfilling for both management and employees.

Some research showed that employees can perform at a much higher rate of productivity when their supervisors and managers paid more attention to them. The Father of Human relations, Elton Mayo, was the first person to reinforce the importance of employee communications, cooperation, and involvement. His studies concluded that sometimes the human factors are more important than physical factors, such as quality of lighting and physical workplace conditions. As a result, individuals often place value more on how they feel. For example, a rewarding system in Human resource management, applied effectively, can further encourage employees to achieve their best performance.

By one account, which is also business legend, the seachange in Human Resources from simply managing the ‘personnel’ function to becoming a proactive governance entity within organisations is said to have first occurred at British Airways in the 1990s. Its HR team devised policies whose intention was to create a positive business culture. One such policy was called the ‘Competency and Behaviour Matrix’. "This listed the professional skill levels and corporate behaviours that were expected from each level of seniority in the business." The behaviours included 'Leadership' and 'Collaboration'. "Job interviews and promotion appraisals included meetings with HR where questions like “Can you describe a time when you demonstrated extraordinary leadership?” would be asked and the answer graded against the matrix." By the turn of the Millennium it was considered best practice, with new behaviours, including 'Diversity Equality and Inclusion' being added to the matrix.

Origins of the terminology
Pioneering economist John R. Commons mentioned "human resource" in his 1893 book The Distribution of Wealth but did not elaborate. The expression was used during the 1910s to 1930s to promote the idea that human beings are of worth (as in human dignity); by the early 1950s, it meant people as a means to an end (for employers). Among scholars the first use of the phrase in that sense was in a 1958 report by economist E. Wight Bakke.

In regard to how individuals respond to the changes in a labor market, the following must be understood:
 * Skills and qualifications: as industries move from manual to more managerial professions so does the need for more highly skilled staff. If the market is "tight" (i.e. not enough staff for the jobs), employers must compete for employees by offering financial rewards, community investment, etc.
 * Geographical spread: how far is the job from the individual? The distance to travel to work should be in line with remuneration, and the transportation and infrastructure of the area also influence who applies for a position.
 * Occupational structure: the norms and values of the different careers within an organization. Mahoney 1989 developed 3 different types of occupational structure, namely, craft (loyalty to the profession), organization career path (promotion through the firm), and unstructured (lower/unskilled workers who work when needed).
 * Generational difference: different age categories of employees have certain characteristics, for example, their behavior and their expectations of the organization.

Criticism of its terminology and role
One major concern about considering people as assets or resources is that they will be commoditized, objectified, and abused. Critics of the term human resources would argue that human beings are not "commodities" or "resources", but are creative and social beings in a productive enterprise. The 2000 revision of ISO 9001, in contrast, requires identifying the processes, their sequence, and interaction, and to define and communicate responsibilities and authorities. In general, heavily unionized nations such as France and Germany have adopted and encouraged such approaches. Also, in 2001, the International Labour Organization decided to revisit and revise its 1975 Recommendation 150 on Human Resources Development, resulting in its "Labour is not a commodity" principle. One view of these trends is that a strong social consensus on political economy and a good social welfare system facilitate labor mobility and tend to make the entire economy more productive, as labor can develop skills and experience in various ways, and move from one enterprise to another with little controversy or difficulty in adapting.

Another important controversy regards labor mobility and the broader philosophical issue with the usage of the phrase "human resources". Governments of developing nations often regard developed nations that encourage immigration or "guest workers" as appropriating human capital that is more rightfully part of the developing nation and required to further its economic growth. Over time, the United Nations have come to more generally support the developing nations' point of view, and have requested significant offsetting "foreign aid" contributions so that a developing nation losing human capital does not lose the capacity to continue to train new people in trades, professions, and the arts. Some businesses and companies are choosing to rename this department using other terms, such as "people operations" or "culture department," in order to erase this stigma. An HR professional who is a critic of its governance has written that "HR has become the clerisy for the management class, driving and enforcing uniformity of opinion," whereas "those who come up with the good ideas in business are the dissidents, the disruptors, the passionate."

Development
Human resource companies play an important part in developing and making a company or organization at the beginning or making a success at the end, due to the labor provided by employees. Human resources are intended to show how to have better employment relations in the workforce. Also, to bring out the best work ethic of the employees and therefore making a move to a better working environment. Moreover, green human resource development is suggested as a paradigm shift from traditional approaches of human resource companies to bring awareness of ways that expertise can be applied to green practices. By integrating the expertise, knowledge, and competencies of human resource development practitioners with industry practitioners, most industries have the potential to be transformed into a sector with ecofriendly and pro-environmental culture.

Human resources also deals with essential motivators in the workplace such as payroll, benefits, team morale and workplace harassment.

Planning
Administration and operations used to be the two role areas of HR. The strategic planning component came into play as a result of companies recognizing the need to consider HR needs in goals and strategies. HR directors commonly sit on company executive teams because of the HR planning function. Numbers and types of employees and the evolution of compensation systems are among elements in the planning role. Various factors affecting Human Resource: planning organizational structure, growth, business location, demographic changes, environmental uncertainties, expansion etc. Additionally, this area encompasses the realm of talent management.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Human resources


text:
Pope Telesphorus

Pope Telesphorus (Τελεσφόρος) was the bishop of Rome from c. 126 to his death c.  137, during the reigns of Roman Emperors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. He was of Greek ancestry and born in Terranova da Sibari,  Calabria, Italy.

The Carmelites venerate Telesphorus as a patron saint of the order since some sources depict him as a hermit living on Mount Carmel. He is also a martyr according to the ancient testimony of Irenaeus.

Biography
Telesphorus is traditionally considered as the eighth Bishop of Rome in succession after Peter. The Liber Pontificalis mentions that he had been an anchorite (or hermit) monk prior to assuming office. According to the testimony of Irenaeus (Against Heresies III.3.3), he suffered a "glorious" martyrdom. Although most early popes are called martyrs by sources such as the Liber Pontificalis (dating to the 3rd century at earliest), Telesphorus is the first to whom Irenaeus, writing considerably earlier (c. 180 AD), gives this title, thus making his martyrdom the earliest attested martyrdom of a pope after Peter.

Eusebius (Church History iv.7; iv.14) places the beginning of his pontificate in the twelfth year of the reign of Emperor Hadrian (128–129) and gives the date of his death as being in the first year of the reign of Antoninus Pius (138–139).

In Roman Martyrology, his feast is celebrated on 2 January; the Eastern churches celebrate it on 22 February.

The tradition of Christmas Midnight Masses, the celebration of Easter on Sundays, the keeping of a seven-week Lent before Easter and the singing of the Gloria are usually attributed to his pontificate, but some historians doubt that such attributions are accurate.

A fragment of a letter from Irenæus to Pope Victor I during the Easter controversy in the late 2nd century, also preserved by Eusebius, testifies that Telesphorus was one of the Roman bishops who always celebrated Easter on Sunday, rather than on other days of the week according to the calculation of the Jewish Passover. Unlike Victor, however, Telesphorus remained in communion with those communities that did not follow this custom.

The town of Saint-Télesphore, in the southwestern part of Canada's Quebec province, is named after him.

title: Pope Telesphorus


text:
Nuclear blackmail

Nuclear blackmail is a form of nuclear strategy in which one of states uses the threat of use of nuclear weapons to force an adversary to perform some action or make some concessions. It is a type of extortion that is related to brinkmanship.

History
In 1950, US president Harry S. Truman publicly stated that the use of nuclear weapons was under "active consideration" against Chinese targets during the Korean War.

In 1953, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened the use of nuclear weapons to end the Korean War if the Chinese refused to negotiate.

In order to support the continued existence of the Republic of China government, the United States issued several nuclear threats against the People's Republic of China in the 1950s to force the evacuation of outlying islands and the cessation of attacks against Quemoy and Matsu.

Declassified documents from the UK National Archives indicate that the United Kingdom considered threatening China with nuclear retaliation in 1961 in the event of a military reclamation of Hong Kong by China.

In 1991, Israel threatened Iraq with a "nuclear counter-response" if there was an attack using chemical weapons during the Gulf War.

In 2002, the George W. Bush administration declared that it was prepared to strike with nuclear missiles against Iraq if biological or chemical weapons were used against American troops or their allies during the Iraq War.

In 2005, Chinese major general Zhu Chenghu said that China might retaliate with nuclear weapons if the United States attacked Chinese forces in a conflict over Taiwan.

On January 2, 2018, US president Donald Trump threatened North Korea by pointing out that the US has much more nuclear firepower than North Korea, in response to a press release stating that a "nuclear button is on Kim Jong-un's desk at all times."

On February 24, 2022, in the TV address where Vladimir Putin announced Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Putin warned that any countries interfering would face consequences they had never encountered in their history. This was widely interpreted as being a threat of nuclear attack. Several days later, Putin put Russia's nuclear forces on a higher state of alert.

title: Nuclear blackmail


text:
Anne Desclos

Anne Cécile Desclos (23 September 1907 – 27 April 1998) was a French literary critic, journalist, and novelist who wrote under the pen names Dominique Aury and Pauline Réage. She is best known for her erotic novel Story of O (1954).

Early life
Born in Rochefort, Charente-Maritime, France to a bilingual family, Desclos began reading in French and English at an early age. After completing her studies at the Sorbonne, she worked as a journalist until 1946 when she joined Gallimard Publishers as the editorial secretary for one of its imprints where she began using the pen name of Dominique Aury.

An avid reader of English literature, Desclos either translated or introduced to readers in France such renowned authors as Algernon Charles Swinburne, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and numerous others. She became a critic and was made a member of the jury for several prominent literary awards.

Career
Desclos' lover and employer Jean Paulhan, a fervent admirer of the Marquis de Sade, had made the remark to her that no woman was capable of writing an erotic novel. To prove him wrong, Desclos wrote a graphic, sadomasochistic novel that was published under the pseudonym Pauline Réage in June 1954. Titled Histoire d'O (Story of O), with a sympathetic preface by Jean Paulhan which nevertheless did not reveal her identity, it was an enormous, though controversial, commercial success. The book caused much speculation as to the identity of the author. Many doubted that it was a woman, let alone the demure, intellectual, and almost prudish persona displayed in Dominique Aury's writings. Many well-known male writers were alternately suspected to be the author, including André Malraux and Henri de Montherlant.

In addition, the book's graphic content sparked so much controversy that the following March the government authorities brought obscenity charges against the publisher and its mysterious author that were thrown out of court in 1959. However, a publicity ban and a restriction on the book's sale to minors was imposed by the judge. Following the lifting of the publicity ban in 1967, the conclusion to Story of O was published under the title Retour à Roissy using the pseudonym of Pauline Réage. However, according to her recent biography by Angie David, Desclos did not write this second novel. In 1975, she did a long interview about erotic books with author Régine Deforges, published by Story of O editor Jean-Jacques Pauvert, yet at the time her authorship was still unknown. An English-language edition of the interview was released in the United States in 1979 by Viking Press.

Eventually, Desclos publicly admitted that she was the author of The Story of O in 1994, 40 years after the book was published, in an interview with The New Yorker. She also explained the pseudonym of Pauline Réage: she chose the first name in homage to Pauline Bonaparte and Pauline Roland and she randomly picked up the name of Réage on a topographic map.

Documentaries
Writer of O, a 2004 documentary film by Pola Rapaport, mixed interviews with re-enactments of certain scenes from the book. In the documentary, the real author of Story of O, Dominique Aury (actually a pen name of Desclos), talks about the book A Girl in Love. This book was written about how Story of O was written.

A documentary was also made for BBC Radio 4 entitled The Story of O: The Vice Francaise, presented by Rowan Pelling, former editor of the Erotic Review, which looked at the history of the book and its author Desclos.

Erotica: A Journey Into Female Sexuality, a documentary by filmmaker Maya Gallus, featured the final interview with 90-year-old Dominique Aury (a pen name of Desclos) before she died. In the film, she recounts the extraordinary love story behind Story of O and marvels that she has reached such a grand age.

Personal life
Desclos had a long-term relationship with her employer, Jean Paulhan, the director of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française, who was 23 years her senior. She was bisexual, and had a liaison with historian Édith Thomas, who may have been an inspiration for the character of Anne-Marie in Story of O. She had a son from a brief marriage in her early twenties.

Legacy
In 2007, the National Leather Association International inaugurated awards for excellence in SM/fetish/leather writing. The categories include the Pauline Reage (a pen name of Desclos) award for fiction novel.

In 2020, Desclos was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame.

title: Anne Desclos


text:
Talk:Middle Earth/Shelob

it is entirely unreasonable to assert here that this is a good nickname for Condoleeza Rice? I've always thought of Bush as Gollum...

Not unreasonable at all. I've always thought of Clinton as Priapus.

Fair enough, as there's apparently no sex in Middle Earth.

Al Gore as Saruman? Nader as Treebeard?

The possibilities are endless...

title: Talk:Middle Earth/Shelob


text:
Case sensitivity

In computers, case sensitivity defines whether uppercase and lowercase letters are treated as distinct (case-sensitive) or equivalent (case-insensitive). For instance, when users interested in learning about dogs search an e-book, "dog" and "Dog" are of the same significance to them. Thus, they request a case-insensitive search. But when they search an online encyclopedia for information about the United Nations, for example, or something with no ambiguity regarding capitalization and ambiguity between two or more terms cut down by capitalization, they may prefer a case-sensitive search.

Areas of significance
Case sensitivity may differ depending on the situation:

 * Searching: Users expect information retrieval systems to be able to have correct case sensitivity depending on the nature of an operation. Users looking for the word "dog" in an online journal probably do not wish to differentiate between "dog" or "Dog", as this is a writing distinction; the word should be matched whether it appears at the beginning of a sentence or not. On the other hand, users looking for information about a brand name, trademark, human name, or city name may be interested in performing a case-sensitive operation to filter out irrelevant results. For example, somebody searching for the name "Jade" would not want to find references to the mineral called "jade". On the English Wikipedia for example a search for friendly fire returns the military article but Friendly Fire (capitalized "Fire") returns the disambiguation page.
 * Usernames: Authentication systems usually treat usernames as case-insensitive to make them easier to remember, reducing typing complexity, and eliminate the possibility of both mistakes and fraud when two usernames are identical in every aspect except the case of one of their letters. However, these systems are not case-blind. They preserve the case of the characters in the name so that users may choose an aesthetically pleasing username combination.
 * Passwords: Authentication systems usually treat passwords as case-sensitive. This enables the users to increase the complexity of their passwords.
 * File names: Traditionally, Unix-like operating systems treat file names case-sensitively while Microsoft Windows is case-insensitive but, for most file systems, case-preserving. For more details, see below.
 * Variable names: Some programming languages are case-sensitive for their variable names while others are not. For more details, see below.
 * URLs: The path, query, fragment, and authority sections of a URL may or may not be case-sensitive, depending on the receiving web server. The scheme and host parts, however, are strictly lowercase.

In programming languages
Some programming languages are case-sensitive for their identifiers (C, C++, Java, C#, Verilog, Ruby, Python and Swift). Others are case-insensitive (i.e., not case-sensitive), such as ABAP, Ada, most BASICs (an exception being BBC BASIC), Common Lisp, Fortran, SQL (for the syntax, and for some vendor implementations, e.g. Microsoft SQL Server, the data itself) and Pascal. There are also languages, such as Haskell, Prolog, and Go, in which the capitalisation of an identifier encodes information about its semantics. Some other programming languages have varying case sensitivity; in PHP, for example, variable names are case-sensitive but function names are not case-sensitive. This means that if you define a function in lowercase, you can call it in uppercase, but if you define a variable in lowercase, you cannot refer to it in uppercase. Nim is case-insensitive and ignores underscores, as long as the first characters match.

In text search
A text search operation could be case-sensitive or case-insensitive, depending on the system, application, or context. The user can in many cases specify whether a search is sensitive to case, e.g. in most text editors, word processors, and Web browsers. A case-insensitive search is more comprehensive, finding "Language" (at the beginning of a sentence), "language", and "LANGUAGE" (in a title in capitals); a case-sensitive search will find the computer language "BASIC" but exclude most of the many unwanted instances of the word. For example, the Google Search engine is basically case-insensitive, with no option for case-sensitive search. In Oracle SQL most operations and searches are case-sensitive by default, while in most other DBMS's SQL searches are case-insensitive by default.

Case-insensitive operations are sometimes said to fold case, from the idea of folding the character code table so that upper- and lowercase letters coincide.

In filesystems
In filesystems in Unix-like systems, filenames are usually case-sensitive (there can be separate readme.txt and Readme.txt files in the same directory). MacOS is somewhat unusual in that, by default, it uses HFS+ and APFS in a case-insensitive (so that there cannot be a readme.txt and a Readme.txt in the same directory) but case-preserving mode (so that a file created as readme.txt is shown as readme.txt and a file created as Readme.txt is shown as Readme.txt) by default. This causes some issues for developers and power users, because most file systems in other Unix-like environments are case-sensitive, and, for example, a source code tree for software for Unix-like systems might have both a file named Makefile and a file named makefile in the same directory. In addition, some Mac Installers assume case insensitivity and fail on case-sensitive file systems.

The older MS-DOS filesystems FAT12 and FAT16 were case-insensitive and not case-preserving, so that a file whose name is entered as readme.txt or ReadMe.txt is saved as README.TXT. Later, with VFAT in Windows 95 the FAT file systems became case-preserving as an extension of supporting long filenames. Later Windows file systems such as NTFS are internally case-sensitive, and a readme.txt and a Readme.txt can coexist in the same directory. However, for practical purposes filenames behave as case-insensitive as far as users and most software are concerned. This can cause problems for developers or software coming from Unix-like environments, similar to the problems with macOS case-insensitive file systems.

title: Case sensitivity


text:
Story of O

Story of O (Histoire d'O, ) is an erotic novel written by French author Anne Desclos under the pen name Pauline Réage, with the original French text published in 1954 by Jean-Jacques Pauvert.

Desclos did not reveal herself as the author for 40 years after the initial publication. Desclos stated she wrote the novel as a series of love letters to her lover Jean Paulhan, who had admired the work of the Marquis de Sade. The novel shares with the latter themes such as love, dominance, and submission.

Plot
Story of O is a tale of female submission involving a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer named O, who is taught to be constantly available for oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse, offering herself to any male who belongs to the same secret society as her lover. She is regularly stripped, blindfolded, chained, and whipped; her anus is widened by increasingly large plugs; her labium is pierced and her buttocks are branded.

The story begins when O's lover, René, brings her to the château in Roissy, where she is trained to serve the members of an elite club. After this initial training, as a demonstration of their bond and his generosity, René hands O to his elder stepbrother Sir Stephen, a more severe master. René wants O to learn to serve someone whom she does not love, and someone who does not love her. Over the course of this training, O falls in love with Sir Stephen and believes him to be in love with her as well. During the summer, Sir Stephen sends O to an old mansion in Samois solely inhabited by women for advanced training and body modifications related to submission. There she agrees to receive permanent marks of Sir Stephen's ownership, in the form of a brand and a steel tag hanging from a labia piercing.

Meanwhile René has encouraged O to seduce Jacqueline, a vain fashion model, and lure her to Roissy. Jacqueline is repulsed when she first sees O's chains and scars, although O herself is proud of her condition as a willing slave. But Jacqueline's younger half-sister becomes enamored of O, and begs to be taken to Roissy.

At the climax, O is presented as a sexual slave, nude but for an owl-like mask and a leash attached to her piercing, before a large party of guests who treat her solely as an object. Afterward, she is shared by Sir Stephen and an associate of his who is referred to only as "The Commander".

Some early editions included several different variations of an epilogue which note that Sir Stephen later abandoned O, though there is debate as to whether Desclos intended it to be included in the finished work; in one such version, O is so distraught by the threat of this abandonment that she insists she would rather die and asks for permission to commit suicide, which is granted.

Publishing history
In February 1955, Story of O won the French literature prize Prix des Deux Magots, but the French authorities still brought obscenity charges against the publisher. The charges were rejected by the courts, but a publicity ban was imposed for a number of years.

Olympia Press published the first English edition in 1965. Eliot Fremont-Smith (of The New York Times) called its publication "a significant event".

Criticism
A critical view of the novel is that it is about, and derives its erotic power from, the ultimate objectification of a woman. The heroine has the shortest possible name. Though this is in fact a shortening of "Odile", it could also stand for "object" or "orifice", an O being a symbolic representation of any "hole". The novel was strongly criticized by many feminists, who felt it glorified the abuse of women. An article by Susan Griffin that appears in  Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis (reprinted from Griffin’s book Pornography and Silence with an introduction) criticizes the novel; Griffin argues that Story of O shows "how a pornographic society turns a woman's heart against herself."

When the film Story of O was released, L'Express magazine ran a feature on the novel and film. This resulted in L'Express being picketed by feminists from the group Mouvement de libération des femmes, who found the novel and film objectionable. Journalist François Chalais also criticized Story of O, claiming the novel glorified violence; he described the novel as "bringing the Gestapo into the boudoir".

Hidden identities
The book's author Anne Desclos used a pen name, then later used another pen name, before finally, just before her death, revealing her true identity. Her lover, Jean Paulhan, wrote the preface as if the author were unknown to him.

According to Geraldine Bedell, "Pauline Réage, the author, was a pseudonym, and many people thought that the book could only have been written by a man. The writer's true identity was not revealed until ten years ago, when, in an interview with John de St. Jorre, a British journalist and sometime foreign correspondent of The Observer, an impeccably dressed 86-year-old intellectual called Dominique Aury acknowledged that the fantasies of castles, masks and debauchery were hers." According to several other sources, however, Dominique Aury was itself a pseudonym of Anne Desclos, born 23 September 1907 in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France, and deceased 26 April 1998 (at age 90) in Paris.

The Grove Press edition (U.S., 1965) was translated by editor Richard Seaver (who had lived in France for many years) under the pseudonym Sabine d'Estrée.

Jean Paulhan
Jean Paulhan, the author's lover and the person to whom she wrote Story of O in the form of love letters, wrote the preface, "Happiness in Slavery". Paulhan admired the Marquis de Sade's work and told Desclos that a woman could not write like Sade. Desclos took this as a challenge and wrote the book. Paulhan was so impressed that he sent it to a publisher. In the preface, he goes out of his way to appear as if he does not know who wrote it. In one part he says, "But from the beginning to end, the story of O is managed rather like some brilliant feat. It reminds you more of a speech than of a mere effusion; of a letter rather than a secret diary. But to whom is the letter addressed? Whom is the speech trying to convince? Whom can we ask? I don't even know who you are. That you are a woman I have little doubt." Paulhan also explains his own belief that the themes in the book depict the true nature of women. At times, the preface (when read with the knowledge of the relationship between Paulhan and the author), seems to be a continuation of the conversation between them.

In an interview Paulhan explained that O, in a religious-like obsession, was seeking the loss of responsibility for her body and mind much like many religious women seek to surrender themselves to the mercy of God. In both cases it is the joy of destruction. Paulhan was also quoted: "To be killed by someone you love strikes me as the epitome of ecstasy". Discussing the ending, Paulhan states, "I too was surprised by the end. And nothing you can say will convince me that it is the real end. That in reality (so to speak) your heroine convinces Sir Stephen to consent to her death."

One critic has seen Paulhan's essay as consistent with other themes in his work, including his interest in erotica, his "mystification" of love and sexual relationships, and a view of women that is arguably sexist.

Legacy
Emmanuelle Arsan claimed the Story of O inspired her to write her own erotic novel Emmanuelle (1967).

A sequel to Story of O, Retour à Roissy (Return to Roissy, but often translated as Return to the Chateau, Continuing the Story of O), was published in 1969 in French, again with Jean-Jacques Pauvert, éditeur. It was published again in English by Grove Press, Inc., in 1971. It is not known whether this work is by the same author as the original.

The town Samois-sur-Seine is mentioned in Story of O as the location of the fictional mansion managed by Anne-Marie, a lesbian dominatrix. In 1978, the name Samois was adopted by a lesbian-feminist BDSM organization based in San Francisco that existed from 1978 to 1983. It was the first lesbian BDSM group in the United States.

In 2007, the National Leather Association International inaugurated awards for excellence in SM/fetish/leather writing. The categories include the Pauline Reage (a pen name of Anne Desclos, author of Story of O) award for fiction novel.

In 2020, Anne Desclos was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame.

Film
American experimental director Kenneth Anger made a 20-minute short film version, l'Histoire d'O, in 1961.

French director Henri-Georges Clouzot wanted to adapt the novel to film for many years, which was eventually done by director Just Jaeckin in 1975 as Histoire d'O (Story of O) produced by Eric Rochat and Gérard Lorin, starring Corinne Cléry and Udo Kier. The film met with far less acclaim than the book. In the United Kingdom it was refused a certificate by the BBFC, and was not passed until February 2000.

In 1975, American director Gerard Damiano, well known for Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), created the movie The Story of Joanna, highly influenced by the Story of O, by combining motifs from one of the book's chapters and from Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit.

In 1979, Danish director Lars von Trier made the short movie entitled Menthe – la bienheureuse, as an homage to Story of O. His 2005 film Manderlay was also inspired by the book, particularly Paulhan's introduction.

Five years later, in 1984, actress Sandra Wey starred as "O" in Story of O - Chapter 2, written, directed and produced by Eric Rochat.

In 1992, a Brazilian miniseries in 10 episodes entitled A História de O starring Claudia Cepeda was written, directed and produced by Eric Rochat, who was the producer of the original 1975 movie.

In 2002, another version of O was released, called The Story of O: Untold Pleasures, with Danielle Ciardi playing the title character.

Comics
In 1975, it was adapted for comics by the Italian artist Guido Crepax. Both the original and Crepax's adaptation were parodied for comics in 2007 by Charles Alverson and John Linton Roberson.

Documentaries
Writer of O, a 2004 documentary film by Pola Rapaport, mixed interviews with re-enactments of certain scenes from the book. In the documentary, the real author of Story of O, Dominique Aury (actually a pen name of Anne Desclos), talks about the book A Girl in Love. This book was written about how Story of O was written.

A documentary was also made for BBC Radio 4 entitled The Story of O: The Vice Francaise, presented by Rowan Pelling, former editor of the Erotic Review, which looked at the history of the book and its author Anne Desclos.

Erotica: A Journey Into Female Sexuality, a documentary film by Maya Gallus produced by Red Queen Productions in 1997, featured the final interview with 90-year-old Dominique Aury (a pen name of Story of O author Anne Desclos) before she died. In the film, she recounts the extraordinary love story behind Story of O and marvels that she has reached such a grand age.

Songs
The 2018 single "O" by the artist Shygirl is based on the book.

title: Story of O


text:
Gábor Szegő

Gábor Szegő (January 20, 1895 – August 7, 1985) was a Hungarian-American mathematician. He was one of the foremost mathematical analysts of his generation and made fundamental contributions to the theory of orthogonal polynomials and Toeplitz matrices building on the work of his contemporary Otto Toeplitz.

Life

Szegő was born in Kunhegyes, Austria-Hungary (today Hungary), into a Jewish family as the son of Adolf Szegő and Hermina Neuman. He married the chemist Anna Elisabeth Neményi in 1919, with whom he had two children.

In 1912 he started studies in mathematical physics at the University of Budapest, with summer visits to the University of Berlin and the University of Göttingen, where he attended lectures by Frobenius and Hilbert, amongst others. In Budapest he was taught mainly by Fejér, Beke, Kürschák and Bauer and made the acquaintance of his future collaborators George Pólya and Michael Fekete. His studies were interrupted in 1915 by World War I, in which he served in the infantry, artillery and air corps. In 1918 while stationed in Vienna, he was awarded a doctorate by the University of Vienna for his work on Toeplitz determinants. He received his Privat-Dozent from the University of Berlin in 1921, where he stayed until being appointed as successor to Knopp at the University of Königsberg in 1926. Intolerable working conditions during the Nazi regime resulted in a temporary position at the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri in 1936, before his appointment as chairman of the mathematics department at Stanford University in 1938, where he helped build up the department until his retirement in 1966. He died in Palo Alto, California. His doctoral students include Paul Rosenbloom and Joseph Ullman. The Gábor Szegö Prize, Szegő Gábor Primary School, and Szegő Gábor Matematikaverseny (a mathematics competition in his former school) are all named in his honor.

Works
Szegő's most important work was in analysis. He was one of the foremost analysts of his generation and made fundamental contributions to the theory of Toeplitz matrices and orthogonal polynomials. He wrote over 130 papers in several languages. Each of his four books, several written in collaboration with others, has become a classic in its field. The monograph Orthogonal polynomials, published in 1939, contains much of his research and has had a profound influence in many areas of applied mathematics, including theoretical physics, stochastic processes and numerical analysis.

Tutoring von Neumann
At the age of 15, the young John von Neumann, recognised as a mathematical prodigy, was sent to study advanced calculus under Szegő. On their first meeting, Szegő was so astounded by von Neumann's mathematical talent and speed that he was brought to tears. Szegő subsequently visited the von Neumann house twice a week to tutor the child prodigy. Some of von Neumann's instant solutions to the problems in calculus posed by Szegő, sketched out on his father's stationery, are now on display at the von Neumann archive at Budapest.

Honours
Amongst the many honours received during his lifetime were:

 * Julius König Prize of the Hungarian Mathematical Society (1928)
 * Member of the Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft (1928)
 * Corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna (1960)
 * Honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1965)

Selected articles

 * with A. C. Schaeffer:
 * with Max Schiffer:
 * with Albert Edrei:
 * with A. C. Schaeffer:
 * with Max Schiffer:
 * with Albert Edrei:
 * with A. C. Schaeffer:
 * with Max Schiffer:
 * with Albert Edrei:
 * with Max Schiffer:
 * with Albert Edrei:
 * with Albert Edrei:
 * with Albert Edrei:

title: Gábor Szegő


text:
Talk:Story of O

Old talk
She not only had a short name, she was on a short leash.

Some critics consider this the first bona fide novel to deliberately sexually stimulate the reader as part of the reading experience, as opposed to being porn, which does that without actually telling a story that anyone cares about. Subjective.

The French consider it a great novel. But they like Jerry Lewis too.

It's worth noting that the book exists in several censored forms, and that its original last chapter includes the heroine's voluntary death... -- 2002 Mar 26, 24.150.61.63

 * This "suicide ending", which is one of two possible endings mentioned in the book, serves as the final paragraph. It is essentially a footnote. As with the other "suppressed" ending mentioned in the paragraph before it, it was omitted by Reage and was never published. Joseph S Atkinson 07:58, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

 * I consider Jerry Lewis a great comic. But I like Story of O too.  And French. Unfree (talk) 19:52, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Title
It seems that this should be titled just "Story of O", to parallel the original title "Histoire d'O". I'm not very fluent in French, but I know there is a definite article (le/la) which is actually used in some situations where articles are not used in English. But mostly I rely on that being the name of three different translations of the book. Two movies were called "The Story of O', but I'd put more emphasis on the book titles. There is an existing, more recent redirection page - I think they should just be swapped.  --NealMcB 22:59, 2004 Jul 23 (UTC)

 * done. double redirections eliminated.  --NealMcB 22:49, 2004 Jul 30 (UTC)

 * As native French speaker, I totally disagree with the interpretation of the omission of the "L'" which has recently appeared in the article. The omission on the contrary gives more emphasis, more importance to the story. For instance we say: Histoire de France, or Histoire du règne de Louis XIV ... omitting the article gives also an 'old fashioned', ancient sound to it. It could also be an hommage to Sade Histoire de Juliette ou les Prospérités du vice  82.120.124.92 28 June 2005 21:59 (UTC)

Ring
What is the significance of the inclusion of the image of the "Ring of Roissy" on this page? There's nothing in the text to indicate why it's important to this article. --206.61.189.130 21:32, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

 * It's the emblem of the secret society in the book... AnonMoos 02:09, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
 * See now Ring of O... AnonMoos (talk) 05:26, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Removed from the article
I removed the following from the article, as it does not appear to have any evidence to support it:
 * It is thought that a real-life O and inspiration in the entourage of Anne Desclos was French novelist Janine Aeply, the wife of French painter Jean Fautrier.

Please do not re-insert this into the article unless it can be supported by citation to an independent source, to which it would need to be attributed. -- Karada 09:23, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

 * The source is Dominique Aury by Angie David - Editions Léo Scheer, 560 pp - ISBN 2756100307 - Biography in French Hektor 22:14, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

It says at the bottom of the article that the film was banned in the UK until 2000 - however it was shown on Channel 4 over 10 years ago (i know this by the place i was living at the time) - is it a mistake, or was it possibly shown with either ignorance of the ban, or was the ban ignored? 81.5.159.222 (talk) 15:52, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Documentation
Writer of O http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/writer_of_o/about.php --Nemissimo II 14:09, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Public Domain
Some people I know have claimed Story of O (or perhaps the English translation) is now public domain. Does anybody have confirmation on this, either way?--Mightyfastpig 07:33, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

 * I would tend to doubt that. Possibly the first English translation could be out of copyright in the U.S. if copyright was not explicitly renewed at the appropriate time, but there would need to be documentation on that. AnonMoos 17:22, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Damien Rice nonsense
I have no real idea who Damian Rice may be, but I do know that his alleged reference to the Story of O seems to be controversial and strongly disputed by some, and furthermore has very little importance to this article. Therefore, it is not appropriate to be included in this article without some kind of source or reference... AnonMoos (talk) 03:18, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Further (2011)
If the putative connection with Story of O is rejected by the editors at O (Damien Rice album) (as seems to be the case), then it should not be added here. AnonMoos (talk) 03:58, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Edit buttons
Two edit buttons, those for "Publishing history", appear out of place. Unfree (talk) 19:48, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Speculations about the origin of the name "O"
"Die Marquise von O..." is a famous novella by Heinrich von Kleist. Desclos being a professional writer is almost certain to have known it. In addition, the novel deals with the rape of an anonymous widow --- her name is abbreviated to its first letter. This can't be a coincidence. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.152.208.69 (talk) 23:01, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

 * However, there's almost no real similarity in subject matter. The Marquise doesn't even know she's been raped until she becomes pregnant, and is a mother of several at the time the story begins and the mother of a number of others by the story's end, without ascertainable masochistic tendencies... AnonMoos (talk) 02:31, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

the question of consent

 * Despite her harsh treatment, O grants permission beforehand for everything that occurs, and her permission is consistently sought.

This is broadly accurate after she leaves the château, but not before. I'm thinking about how to amend it. —Tamfang (talk) 01:21, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

 * We aren't directly told very much about René and O before the stay at Roissy. Asking consent is not the way things are done at Roissy, but she's not dragged away unwillingly there, and she seemed to know something about it before she went. AnonMoos (talk) 19:03, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

 * Well, there are signs that while writing the first few scenes the author had not quite decided where she was going with it, and unfortunately there's scarcely a word about O's thoughts before she is put to bed the first night (in contrast to the rest of the book!). But I would point out:
 * In the car, she clearly does not know what's going on. (But she does not question.)
 * René's last words before O enters the château: ...si tu n'obéissais pas tout de suite, on te ferait obéir. (I wonder why this tense rather than n'obéis ... fera.)
 * Perhaps René's line in the car was first written as indirect dialogue (il lui dit que si elle n'obéissait pas on la ferait obéir) and then changed to direct quotation, without changing the tense. It wouldn't be the only slip in the first scenes. —Tamfang (talk) 05:08, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
 * René tells his new friends that he has never tied her up.
 * "Before leaving, I would like to have you whipped, and this time I ask it of you. Do you accept?" I think that's the only time she's asked anything before she meets Sir Stephen.
 * Indeed, in the scene where she meets Sir Stephen, she's distressed partly because, now that he and René have asked her consent, she can no longer tell herself that she is innocent of bringing about what happens to her. —Tamfang (talk) 00:05, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
 * —Tamfang (talk) 07:30, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

 * She may not know the specifics of what awaits her at Roissy, but she must have a fairly clear idea that things are going to be kicked up to the next level, and she doesn't run screaming from the car... AnonMoos (talk) 16:48, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

 * I accept that before getting into the taxi she had agreed to (or even suggested) something vague. (A point in support: when she goes back to work, her colleagues ask "Why did you take your vacation at this season?" rather than "What happened to you?") But the phrase her permission is consistently sought means more than that, to me. —Tamfang (talk) 05:08, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

When she meets Sir Stephen, he and René ask for her active assent, and she finds it much harder to speak up than to accept passively what was done to her at the château. —Tamfang (talk) 16:00, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

In bed with René on the first morning:
 * «C'est parce qu'il t'est facile de consentir que je veux de toi ce à quoi il te sera impossible de consentir [....] On obtiendra ta soumission malgré toi [....]» O allait répondre qu'elle était son esclave, et portait ses liens avec joie. Il l'arrêta [....]

Here, not only is her consent not asked, it is rejected! —Tamfang (talk) 03:56, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

50th anniversary coming
It will be 50 years since publication in 2014. Is anyone planning to commemorate this? Like it or loathe it O is undeniably one of the most influential novels of the 20th century. Or indeed any century.  Smokey TheCat  09:25, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

 * Is it really widely influential, or mostly only among certain subcultures? In any case, Wikipedia can report on notable anniversary celebrations, but it's not a place for organizing them... AnonMoos (talk) 12:42, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

 * You misspelled "60" ;) —Tamfang (talk) 04:41, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

Plot ending
I think the last scene of the movie needs to be mentioned in the plot section. Despite O's complete submission throughout the film, it ends with her burning an O into her master's skin. This ending is important and highlights complexity of the master-slave relationship. 69.119.232.155 (talk) 04:05, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

 * It's wildly inconsistent with the book, though. Add it to the paragraph about Jaeckin's movie, if you like. —Tamfang (talk) 04:40, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

 * There is nothing complex in the master-slave relationship. If complexity there was ( in the book the tone is rather leading to the contrary ), it is put in the internal struggle of the individual, a balance between the requirements of her social statute that could be resumed with "arrogance", and her attraction for living a part of her life fully irresponsible. The masters intend to grant her that privilege, for their benefit while remaining themselves free, which means, themselves not obviously responsible for her degradation. By the way, there are some unsourced assertions in #Publishing history. P.R's choice for a name starts rather with Odalisque, and other considerations. --Askedonty (talk) 11:02, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

"publicity ban"
I wonder if this is a mistranslation. French "publicité" basically means advertising... AnonMoos (talk) 12:08, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

translation publisher

 * The Grove Press edition was translated by editor Richard Seaver (who had lived in France for many years) under the pseudonym Sabine d'Estrée and published by Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press.

Um … is there something remarkable about that last part?? —Tamfang (talk) 08:08, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

No discussion of Frasier Crane?
Story of O was mentioned on Frasier, when Roz dresses as her for Halloween. People go 'Oh' every time she says who she's dressed as.

Just wondered if someone might want to mention that. -- 00:30, 14 July 2021 2a02:c7d:11fc:3300:2d76:66f6:d14f:da8f

 * It was in a previous version of the article, then someone eventually deleted it as pop-culture trivia. (At least it was valid trivia, unlike the annoying Damien Rice thing...) -- AnonMoos (talk) 07:48, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

une fille amoureuse

 * In the documentary, the real author of Story of O, Dominique Aury, talks about the book A Girl in Love. This book was written about how Story of O was written.

Book? That's the title of the preface to the sequel Retour à Roissy … —Tamfang (talk) 18:41, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Does anyone have access to a digital record of Edition VIII of the literary magazine Encounter?
The point is that this exact copy contains a highly interesting claim about the book, that it was inspired by the Austrian philosoper Otto Weininger´s ideas about the absolute man and the absolute woman, and that role plaid by the character of ´O´ is a reflection of the absolute woman. I don´t cite the book that lists this edition of the magazine as a footnote within itself as a reference here, because the overrall subject of the book is too different from what is being discussed in the article here. StrongALPHA (talk) 09:44, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

 * It was edited by Stephen Spender. StrongALPHA (talk) 12:39, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Story of O


text:
Talk:Middle Earth/Gollum

I've also heard "gollum" (small g) used as a derisive nickname for nanotechnologists and "downloading" advocates. I'll try to dig up a source. Another one of those "big-G" versus "small-g" overloaded Proper/generic issues. Sigh. Maybe we'll be lucky and that usage won't become prevalent.

title: Talk:Middle Earth/Gollum


text:
Pope Nicholas IV

Pope Nicholas IV (Nicolaus IV; born Girolamo Masci; 30 September 1227 – 4 April 1292) was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 22 February 1288 to his death, on 4 April 1292. He was the first Franciscan to be elected pope.

Early life
Jerome Masci (Girolamo Masci) was born on 30 September 1227 at Lisciano, near Ascoli Piceno. He was a pious, peace-loving man whose goals as a Franciscan friar were to protect the Church, promote the crusades, and root out heresy. According to Heinrich of Rebdorf, he was a Doctor of Theology. As a Franciscan friar, he had been elected the Order's superior (minister) for Dalmatia during the Franciscan general chapter held at Pisa in 1272. Pope Gregory X (1271-1276), was sending a legate to the Byzantine emperor, Michael VIII Palaiologos, in 1272, to invite the participation of Byzantine prelates in the Second Council of Lyons. The pope's ambition was to achieve a reunion of Eastern and Western Christendom. St Bonaventure, then minister general of the Order of Friars Minor (Franciscans), was asked to select four Franciscans to accompany the legation as nuncios. He chose Friar Jerome Masci as one of the four. When Bonaventure died suddenly during the fifth session of the Order's General Chapter at Lyons on 15 July 1274, Friar Jerome Masci was elected to succeed him as the Franciscan minister general, even though he was absent at the time, only then returning with the Byzantine delegates from the embassy to Constantinople.

Jerome was the associate of John of Vercelli, master general of the Dominican Order, when the latter was sent by Pope Nicholas III (Giovanni Caetani Orsini) on 15 October 1277, to arrange a peace between Philip IV of France and Alfonso III of Aragon. Jerome and John of Vercelli were again appointed to the same task on 4 April 1278. At the same time, Jerome was ordered to continue for the time being as the Franciscan Minister General.

In 1278 Jerome was made cardinal priest by Pope Nicholas III, and at some point after 16 May 1279 was assigned the titular church of Santa Pudenziana. Even after his appointment as a cardinal, he was allowed to remain as minister general of the Franciscans until the next general chapter. In the event, however, he was unable to attend the chapter for reasons of ill health, as a letter of apology of Pope Nicholas III, written in May 1279, indicates. On 12 April 1281 he was promoted to cardinal bishop of Palestrina by Pope Martin IV.

Papal conclave
After the death of Pope Honorius IV on 3 April 1287, a conclave was held in Rome, at the papal palace next to Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill, where Pope Honorius had died. This was in accordance with the Constitution Ubi periculum of Pope Gregory X. At the beginning, in April, there were thirteen cardinals in Rome; three cardinals—Gerardo Bianchi, Giovanni Boccamati, and Jean Cholet—did not attend at all. The Sacred College was for a time hopelessly divided in its selection of a successor. When six of the electors died during the year 1287 (Ancher Pantaleon, Geoffrey de Bar, Hugh of Evesham, Giordano Orsini, Comes de Casanate, and Goffredo of Alatri—some, at least, carried off by fever), the others, with the sole exception of Jerome Masci, left the conclave and returned to their homes. It was not until the following year that they reassembled. The electors at that time were seven in number: Jerome Masci, along with Latino Malabranca, Bentivenga de Bentivengis, Bernard de Languissel, Matteo Rosso Orsini, Giacomo Colonna, and Benedetto Caetani. On 15 February 1288, the survivors unanimously elected Jerome Masci, to the papacy on the first scrutiny. It is said that the cardinals were impressed by his steadfastness in remaining at the papal palace, but there is no real documentation as to their motives. As he admitted in his electoral manifesto, Cardinal Masci was extremely reluctant to accept, and indeed he persisted in his refusal for an entire week. Finally, on 22 February, he gave in and agreed. He became the first Franciscan pope and chose the name Nicholas IV in remembrance of Nicholas III, who had made him a cardinal.

New cardinals
Given the considerable losses to the numbers of the Sacred College in 1286 and 1287, it is not surprising that Nicholas IV quickly proceeded to fill vacancies. What is surprising is that he did not even reach the number of cardinals who were alive under Honorius IV, let alone exceed it. On 16 May 1288, he named six new cardinals: Bernardus Calliensis, Bishop of Osimo (who died in 1291), Hugues Aiscelin (Seguin) de Billon, OP, of the diocese of Clermont in the Auvergne; Matthew of Aquasparta in Tuscany, minister general of the Franciscans since 1287; Pietro Peregrosso of Milan, the vice-chancellor of the Holy Roman Church; Napoleone Orsini; and Pietro Colonna.

Nicholas IV issued an important constitution on 18 July 1289, which granted to the cardinals one-half of all income accruing to the Holy See and a share in the financial management, thereby paving the way for that independence of the College of Cardinals which, in the following century, was to be of detriment to the papacy.

Actions
In regard to the question of the Sicilian succession, as feudal suzerain of the kingdom, Nicholas annulled the treaty, concluded in 1288 through the mediation of Edward I of England, which confirmed James II of Aragon in the possession of the island of Sicily. This treaty had not properly seen to papal interests. In May 1289 he crowned Charles II as king of Sicily after the latter had expressly recognized papal suzerainty, and in February 1291 concluded a treaty with Kings Alfonso III of Aragon and Philip IV of France looking toward the expulsion of James from Sicily.

In 1288 Nicholas met with the Nestorian Christian Rabban Bar Sauma from China.

In August 1290 he granted the status of studium generale to the university that King Denis of Portugal has just founded a few months earlier in the city of Lisbon.

The loss of Acre in 1291 stirred Nicholas IV to renewed enthusiasm for a crusade. He sent missionaries, among them the Franciscan John of Monte Corvino, to labour among the Bulgarians, Ethiopians, Mongols, Tatars and Chinese.

Death
Nicholas IV died in Rome on 4 April 1292, in the palace which he had built next to the Liberian Basilica (S. Maria Maggiore). He was buried in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. His epitaph reads: "Here lies Nicolas IV son of St. Francis" (Hic requiescit / Nicolaus PP Quartus / Filius Beati Francisci).

Taxatio
The 1291–92 Taxatio he initiated, which was a detailed valuation for ecclesiastical taxation of English and Welsh parish churches and prebends, remains an important source document for the medieval period. An edition was reprinted by the Record Commission in 1802 as Taxatio Ecclesiastica Angliae et Walliae Auctoritate.

title: Pope Nicholas IV


text:
Talk:Abbey

Pics
There are lots more illustrations yet, which I'll be adding in the next few days. Some are not small. I'm going to split the page up into Abbey, Abbey (2), Abbey (3) etc. so we don't have a megabyte sized page. Unless anyone has a better idea for the nomenclature of the subdivided pages? Malcolm Farmer

Seems like the natural split is to split it into individual articles about each abbey, at the existing subheads (Clairveaux, Kirkstall, etc.) --LDC

..OK, seems reasonable.. Malcolm Farmer

You might want to build a reorganization around a disambig page that would also reference Abbey Theatre, Abbey Road, etc. GreatWhiteNortherner 11:12, Jan 12, 2004 (UTC)

Redirect
"Monastery" is redirecting here. That should be changed, since "monastery" is applicable to several religions, whereas "abbey" is not. (see for instance Monasticism) for a broader definition). Maybe "Monasticism" and "Monastery" should be merged into a single article, or "Monastery" should become a disambiguation page. olivier 03:56 Dec 2, 2002 (UTC)

Nunnery
I had heard that the term "nunnery" in Shakespeare's era was commonly slang for brothel. That Hamlet's dismissal of Ophelia, "Get thee to a nunnery" would have been a widely understood double entendre.

However, it's only hearsay for me, I'd prefer to find some scholarly substantiation before editing the main article with this. Anyone? JimD 21:24, 2004 May 3 (UTC)
 * I've just come across this today. I was always of exactly the same view.  But again, hearsay.   JackofOz 10:20, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

 * Is there no article yet on Anticlericalism? --Wetman 19:26, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Organizing
A look at "What links here" shows how huge this article is capable of becoming. Perhaps each Order should have a brief paragraph here, with a note Main article at... Bulleted under it, perhaps a linked list of individual abbeys, with a sentence of founding, location, historical importance. Should the abbeys be grouped by general location, within each order? Perhaps later: an easy job. Similarly condensed abstracts of further articles should follow the layout of the Orders. I can think of Abbey (architecture) and Abbey (scriptorium), for examples. --Wetman 19:26, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * I'd like to re-organize and clean up this article - if there are no other candidates for the task. Please notify me, anybody, if you have already started to do so.Chingon86 21:33, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
 * And while I'm having a go at that, I intend to eliminate the 1911 Encyclopedia part. Does anybody mind?Chingon86 01:20, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Neat
I had a project on abbeys and this was very useful!! --H~DS 02:36, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Restored lost text
I've restored the text that was recently deleted. Perhaps a joke? --Wetman 08:44, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Blanking text
The following is copied here from User talk:Wetman (Wetman 00:37, 27 January 2007 (UTC))

Thank you for restoring all of the text I deleted from "Abbey" -- including all of the material about priories which is factually completely ubtrue, all of the material about friaries and other monasteries which are not abbeys at all, and all of the minutiae about a handful of abbeys picked out for mention above the 1,000s of other abbeys for no discernible reason. You ahve done a great service to making Wikipedia more useful.HarvardOxon 22:03, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

 * The better sort of Wikipedia editor is at least as careful about what one deletes as what one adds. Deleting is not editing. Blanking sections of text is a form of vandalism. Quibbles about monasteries that are not abbeys but friaries etc. need to be addressed in the text— by someone who is competent to do so. Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 text needs thoughtful revising, not trashing. These posts are being copied at Talk:Abbey. --Wetman 00:37, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

If to you it is a "quibble" whether or not a "monastery" is an abbey or a friary, you have absolutely no "qualification" to be reverting edits. This is not the 1911 text of the Britannica, this is a lot of stufff added after. Blanking sections is not a "form of vandalism" when that section is wrong...factually in error. leaving it in is a form of intellectual vandalism. In short, your high-handed reverts were made by someone who doesn't know what the hel he's talking about.HarvardOxon 02:11, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Archabbeys
The link Archabbey redirects here. So. What exactly is an archabbey? It is not addressed anywhere in the article. Rwflammang 20:27, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

 * That is how I arrived here today as well. Varlaam (talk) 18:20, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
 * This still needs to be addressed in the article. Tom (talk) 04:21, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Originality
Is this original ? Most of this sounds like overblown text lifted from a rather sycophantic single source. 86.160.77.50 (talk) 05:01, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Limited Definition and Confusing Details
This article refers only to buildings within a Christian religious context, where as the term "abbey" may also refer to certain Buddhist monastery-like centers and to certain English estates (now popularized by the "Downton Abbey" television series). In addition, it seems to include a substantial detail about specific buildings like the Great Lavra and St. Gall, which could be stand-alone articles.Roxielobo (talk) 23:26, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

 * Buddhist centres? Who cares. Let them have their own article, since such an institution would have a proper name within their traditions, without piggybacking on this article.
 * And if a post-Dissolution of the Monasteries abbey becomes an estate, what of it? You can't travel through the Spanish-speaking world without tripping over "ex-convents" everywhere you go. The hit TV show, Downton Ex-Abbey.
 * Varlaam (talk) 18:33, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

"the chapterhouse, the refecrefectory, the kitchen-court"
Quite possibly the world's only surviving "refecrefectory".

Does each person receive two helpings? Varlaam (talk) 18:23, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Abbey vs monastery
This article should describe the differences between an abbey and a monastery. Also, it seems to be covering a lot of the generic concepts also defined in Monastery. I believe the two articles should be reviewed and simplified in parallel.--Codrin.B (talk) 00:37, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Anglican
This article fails to be broadly inclusive of the historical accuracy of faiths, beyond narrowly Catholic, which have long utilized abby and monatery. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.119.165.126 (talk) 18:06, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

Originality: part 2
The majority of the article is copy pasted from Encyclopedia Britannica 1911; whereas, due to its public domain status, it is legal, however, that does not lend itself to a smooth, modern, concise, accurate article (IMHO). I am going to start rewriting it in the coming days. speednat (talk) 22:19, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
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title: Talk:Abbey