Why do most languages have something like a word that sounds like mama that means mother? Etymology, the study of the history of language and words, tells us part of the story, but biology tells us the other part. And we really can figure out why some things come to stand for other things, […]
Anonymous No Longer Needs To Be a Woman
Virginia Woolf wrote in the early 20th Century For most of history, anonymous was a woman. It seems fitting to start out a month of 26 posts, from A to Z, and centered on the topic of The Iconic Feminine with a look at feminine anonymity. This exercise is prompted by the annual April A […]
Giving Beyond The Boxed Gift
This time of year makes me think of gifts and what women are giving to the next generation. This year, 2017, has been an extremely tumultuous time. To use a kitchen and baking metaphor our cultural batter is being is being whipped up, over-beaten, into a flat mess that may have a difficult time […]
Why Language Matters, Mitt
I absolutely loved the Semiotic, Non-verbal Communication, and Linguistic Anthropology courses I took as an Undergraduate and Graduate Student with Myrdene Anderson and the late, great O. Micheal Watson. This summer, after I found out O. Michael was in hospice due to esophageal cancer, I tried to compose a very short note to send to […]
Cobwebs
The word cobwebs sounds like a word Gertrude Stein could have invented. Inverted it could have been webcobs which could easily be mis-heard as copse. Web copse or web forests sounds spooky and eerily like something that the beings of Middle Earth would encountered beyond the Shire. And we know that spiders are very nasty […]
Just Saying, Bless His Heart
“Just saying” is a new version of old turn of phrase, just saying. I love language. It is all arbitrary sounds associated with meaning that we create in our heads. How amazing is that? That we can communicate with each other at all astounds me. We have layered meaning on meaning and teach everything to […]