Pregnant women are often regaled with comments about the similarity of the stuff in their bellies cushioning their progeny to the ocean. Oceans and amniotic fluid do not have exactly the same salinity as is oft quoted as fact. Amniotic fluid has about 2% salinity. Oceans are 3.0 to 3.5% dissolved salts. All life does seem to […]
Names and Naming
Names are powerful. Most of us know that some cultures view personal names as so powerful that they are shared only with the closest immediate family members. But many things have names. A linguistics course taken long, long ago taught me about markedness, about marked and unmarked terms. In these oppositional pairs one term is […]
Mothers and Others, the Mosaic of Women in Our Lives
Mothers Mothers are probably the most influential people in the world. I am not sure that it was always this way for every culture in the world. In Sparta, mothers gave their sons over to the state to begin training as warriors at age seven. In upper class, historic, European families mothers did not nurse […]
Labyrinths, Lace, and Limitations
Limits First, let us set the record straight. Constraints can be a very good thing. Many people I have talked to think the terms limitation and constraint are the same thing. They are not. There are both limiting and enabling constraints. And sometimes those limits enable. I suspect that anyone who has parented a toddler […]
Kith, Kin, and Kindred Souls
I have already written about family and friends in the set of articles I am writing as basic content about legacy in the first month of this site being live, so why would I also write about other words for family and friends, kin and kith? In the earlier article, about Family and Friendship in Legacy, I […]
Juggling Jackets and Hijab
After thinking about how best to discuss the role that clothing plays in women’s culture, I decided to look at two contemporary pieces of clothing that say much about the how clothing expresses some of the most basic information about how women interact with, shape and are shaped by the clothing.Both are worn primarily to […]