Shagging in North Carolina

I’ve gotten used to a lot of things here in North Carolina, but I still can’t help giggling when I hear people say they know how to “shag.”  To the British and all who are familiar with them, the term “shag” means to have sex… a meaning that people here somehow manage to ignore.
Of course, [...]

RapLeaf based in California… of course

RapLeaf, the site dedicated to helping people to trust one another, is based in California.  Of course.
Being from the Golden State myself, it makes perfect sense to me that this is where they would come up with such an idea, to “help” people trust each other.  Here in North Carolina, where I am currently in [...]

Your Reputation on RapLeaf

Have you heard of “Rapleaf”? It is an online site dedicated to rating people’s reputations so that others will know if they should do business with them or not. If you have had any activity on the internet, like a Facebook or Myspace account, or perhaps you have bought something on Amazon, you [...]

118 Million Strong

CNN reports that there were 118 million prescriptions written last year for drugs to fight depression. It occurred to me, a few hours after hearing about this, that this only gives us an idea of the people WITH health insurance who actually seek help for their depression, but leaves out those without insurance or [...]

Semanturgy and Religion

Beginning at age 13, I have searched for meaning in many religions. Raised Catholic, I have explored New Age ideas, a couple of Native American spiritual paths, I have experienced a couple of other kinds of Christianity, I’ve read Taoist and Buddhist texts, even attended a couple of Unitarian Universalist services. I’ve read [...]

The Best Fortune

Yesterday, in addition to having the best Chinese buffet lunch I’ve ever had, I got the best fortune in my cookie that I’ve ever gotten.
(This is more impressive if you bear in mind that I waited tables at a Chinese restaurant, which for the record had no buffet, for seven years and we were allowed [...]

Semanturgy and language education

Let’s face it, there are two kinds of people studying foreign languages today in our elementary and secondary educational institutions as well as in our colleges and universities: people who want to and people who are required to. 
The people who want to learn another language, who drool at the sight of a new vocabulary list [...]

Semanturgy – meaning as medium

When you study a second (or third or fourth) language, there comes a point in your conversational ability where you stop trying to translate everything you hear and say into and out of your native language. The words of this new language become directly linked into meaning, and when you mean something, suddenly an [...]

Semanturgy, a preliminary discussion

I am imagining an alternate way to approach meaning in the world.  Semantics and other similar studies deal with meaning in what seems to me a very passive way, simply observing the relationships between symbols, signs, and meanings.  I added a suffix that signifies “work” so that the word denotes an active usage of meaning. [...]

Innocent until accused, guilty until you get it spun professionally

Is it naive of me to think that “innocent until proven guilty” is profoundly meaningful? That this principle is and should always continue to be a sacred tenet of our society?
So why don’t we behave that way. Why, if Roger Clemens is truly and completely innocent of illegal enhancement use, did he have [...]

Pitfalls of Democracy

According to American propaganda, democracy is the cure for the world’s ills.
While I would also rank democracy as among the most valuable developments of humanity, it seems we might want to work out some of the kinks before we thrust it upon everyone else.
With alarming frequency we hear of violence in countries where elections have [...]

Experts

Our society becomes supremely credentialed.  I am a passionate proponent of education, but as the inflation of degrees continues, we are forced into massive debt simply to justify our worthiness to do anything. And as we earn these degrees, we move further and further away from the true nature of our subject material.
In eras past, once [...]