Let me tell you about one of my favorite things. The pigeon and dove family, Columbidae, is a group of widespread and common birds. Members of this family were domesticated thousands of years ago and they have had symbolic importance throughout history. Many species continue to live closely with humans. People who keep pigeons are…
Tag: metaphor
Remark: The naming of The Matrix (1999)
I don’t know how the title of The Matrix was chosen, but it’s an interesting title. I mean, I know it’s named after the matrix in the movie, but I don’t know how that name was chosen. Most people know the term matrix from math, where it refers to a 2D array of numbers. In…
Article share: ‘Bun in the oven’ is an ancient pregnancy metaphor. This historian says it has to go
October 31, 2023 NPR article by Selena Simmons-Duffin It’s a kind of cutesy little way of saying that someone is pregnant to say they have “a bun in the oven.” That metaphor is really old – it first appears in texts by Hippocrates about 2,000 years ago to describe the process of gestation. But if…
Words don’t have meanings
There is an argument I have heard. It goes like this: “Words have meanings.” The implication is that one cannot just use words to mean whatever they want, the words have defined meanings and these definitions are the only things those words can mean. I have seen this argument used a variety of contexts, from…
thoughts on mind 