Tag: language
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Words, words, words!
I can’t remember when it first became evident to me that my mind was not alone in the universe I occupied; perhaps it wasn’t immediately clear to me that others, too, had thoughts and that they may well be different from my own. The Theory of Mind, as it’s now called, develops early in childhood […]
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Does Beauty live with Kindness?
I don’t know how many times I’ve written about beauty, but it continues to intrigue me. Not so much about what it is -its constituent parts, its definitions, or even its historical and sociological roots- but more its ability to morph -mutate, if you will- from something that is to something that isn’t. How, in […]
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Is Everybody a Petard?
Sociology is certainly interesting; it turns out that none of us are normal -well, perhaps more revealingly, there is no normal ‘us’. We are, at best, data points spread out on a rather amorphous Bell curve, vaguely generalizable depending on the homogeneity of the group chosen, but often unrepresentative of populations further afield. And yet, […]
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Memory Vaults
After a certain age, many of us have concerns about our memories. Nothing much at first, of course -just things like forgetting why you went into the kitchen, or where you put your keys. Later, it can progress to having to write down a phone number immediately after you hear it, say, rather than trusting […]
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Let Virtue be as Wax
We are all products of our era, and often unbeknownced to us, our language is to blame. Words become signposts that reassure us that we know where we are headed. Where we came from. And yet they can be as lost as us –especially in the domain of sexuality. Even the word ‘sex’ itself –a […]
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The Mistaken Identity
Communication is a fascinating thing. It enables descriptions of the world in different sounds, different gestures, different expressions. A shrug of indifference in one culture is a greeting in another. A nod can convey a myriad of intentions -context is everything. Only the smile seems a common currency. As a gynaecologist, I am ruled by […]
musings on women's health 