Tag: meaning
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I will a round unvarnished tale deliver
There are times when I find myself wondering about things like I did when I was a child: about whether there are any benefits of Age, for example; about why uninvited questions arise while I am gardening, or when I’m having an evening glass of wine. Nowadays, I wonder if it’s all the result of…
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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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What do you mean?
What do we mean by meaning? Whoaa. I love questions like that: an autological wrestling match, perhaps, and yet an important one, I think. Does everything have meaning, or does that happen only when there is an intention that it should? Meaning, after all, is not necessarily inherent in everything -a rock lying on the…
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An accident of birth
For years now, I have picked through the garden of my life -sometimes for pleasure, and sometimes for utility. I weed, of course -the privilege of growing in my aging plot is largely contingent on my having planted it in the first place. Contingent on the purpose for which it was intended. Things that arrive…
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Understanding as…
There is so much stuff out there that I don’t know -things that I hadn’t even thought of as knowledge. Things that I just accepted as ‘givens’. You know, take the ability to understand something like, say, an arrangement of numbers as a series rather than a bunch of numbers, or the ability to extract…
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Medical Revisionism
Words -that’s all they are: sounds that by their very presence magically communicate meaning. They are more than mere noise or background. They are not the wind rustling through the leaves, nor the sounds of a frog in a pond; in a way, they are entities that resolve uncertainty, and in as much as they…
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The Linguistic Pregnancy
What is pregnancy? What’s in a name, for that matter..? Is it true that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, or is there something in the name itself that alters and affects that to which it refers? Neo-Whorfianism, in other words… For example, the Chinese word for what we in English…
musings on women's health 