Tag: cultural norms
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The difference between the almost right word and the right word, is like a lightning bug and the lightning
It’s rather easy for those of us who share a culture and language (such as English) to forget that the meanings of some of the expressions we use do not follow from their lexical makeup: the idioms. They can play unique havoc in translations: foreign poetry, for example. Metaphors may or may not cross…
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Eternal Maternal?
Some things are just not said, just not considered. They fall so far outside of our Weltanschauung they are inadmissible. And we take such comfort in their ubiquity that we no longer feel a need to discuss them. They are so self-evidently true, so axiomatic to our understanding of existence that they seem indispensable. Crucial……
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Menstrual Taboos
Culture shapes behaviour, attitudes and beliefs -or is it the other way around? The chicken or the egg? This has puzzled me since I was a child wondering why everybody I knew wore jeans but in pictures the people living in, say, India did not. And the members of my family –uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins- all…