fluorocarbon
When people talk about "Rome's fall," they're usually referring to the decline of the western half of the empire which happened 400-500 years after the fall of the Republic. The reasons for this fall are debated, but it's likely due to some combination of plague, invasions, elite infighting, and a lack of rules about succession leading to constant civil wars.
Translate it literally as "wine-face" and it usually makes sense in English. In the case of the sea, it's referring to its dark wine-like surface. In the case of the cows, it's their ruddy wine-like color. There's also an element of the cows being strong, since wine can create an invigorating feeling in the drinker.
For some reason the English-speaking world thinks it has to be translated as a color word. Maybe because it was incorrectly translated as wine-dark? But it's not exclusively a color word, just like "metallic" is not exclusively a color word in English. It means exactly what it says: wine-faced, having a wine-like surface.
The Greeks didn't drink wine in glasses like we do today. They mixed wine in a giant mixing bowl called a κρατήρ (krater). It could be different colors and was sometimes cloudy, like natural wines are today. They often mixed in honey, herbs, and fruit. Wine was also seen as a god: we say that Dionysos was the god of wine, but to the Greeks, wine itself was commonly thought of as being Dionysos.
So when imagining an oinops pontos, instead of picturing of a glass of pinot noir, imagine a huge bowl sitting in a candle-lit room, filled with a dark cloudy liquid, still swirling and bubbling slightly, shapes occasionally surfacing, a sheen reflecting the flickering candle light, containing a mysterious divine power. That's what Homer's referencing when he says wine-faced. The surface of the sea is like the surface of that bowl of wine–probably with the implication of a mysterious divine power beneath.
This comment reminds me of another Shirky essay [1]. He says:
> [This is] the pattern for descriptions of the Semantic Web. First, take some well-known problem. Next, misconstrue it so that the hard part is made to seem trivial and the trivial part hard. Finally, congratulate yourself for solving the trivial part.
The difficult part is figuring out exactly what is and what isn't true. If we had a perfect map of reality it would be easy to detect fake news. In fact we wouldn't need any news at all or journalists or anyone else except the people who build the ontology.
[1] http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/semantic_s...
Stylistic points aside, I strongly disagree that the obsession with image has been the same with every generation. It's existed, for sure, but substance used to matter more. For example, college admissions were previously more reliant on tests than they are today. Kids are stuck in a vicious circle of pretending to care more and more about things they hate like public service and high school sports--that's, I think, the point of the article, and it's an important point to make, even if the article's style could use some polishing.