Tag: language

  • The Problem of Naming

    The Problem of Naming

    “This is a Blarg,” said my partner, placing his glass of wine in the middle of the table. We were at a friend’s house late in the evening, on a rare vacation without our children. The conversation had taken a turn, as they frequently do in my world, for the philosophical. We had a moment…

  • What I Thought About While Cutting Firewood

    Yesterday, I was out limbing fallen trees so that we can cut them up with the chainsaw without killing ourselves. It is good not to freeze to death. It is also good not to have logs fall on you while preventing freezing to death. What I was thinking about was this: When we first moved…

  • Gender Inclusive Language

    This falls into the “tidbits from my notebook” category: “Our most important stories are silent, woven into the fabric of our language. (This is not a novel idea. There are no novel ideas, but paradoxically, each particular combination is unique.) “Everybody knows that ‘he’ includes women,” is only even available as a thought because somebody…