Yellow traffic lights urge caution; yellow bellies nickname cowardice. Ships fly the Yellow Jack flag under quarantine. Perhaps because of the yellow tinge of jaundice, yellow is often used to suggest physical or mental illness.The dualism is ancient, but weirdly, as Sabine Doran points out in "The Culture of Yellow," fresh symbolism bloomed in the 1890s.
Cherries are about desire, not chastity. We pick them carefully, cherry pick them. Tasting and choosing, we graft our hunger to their reality.
When medieval monks felt bored (which was not yet a concept), they called it a sin: acedia. A spiritual deadness. There was no one to blame but themselves (or Satan), so they confessed and prayed back their liveliness. We, on the other hand, are connoisseurs, curators of happiness rather than holiness.
Sand itself is sterile; nothing grew on that beach. It was littered with driftwood and shells and odd marine creatures who had washed up there, like old men on park benches. But yes, it held a world.
I wriggle at “childless,” hating the suggestion that I am too selfish to bother, but I am just as uncomfortable with the cold, scathing label of parents as “breeders.” It is tiresome to be asked, “You’ve got kids?” as a precondition to understanding what the speaker is about to say. It also stings to hear people say that “you just don’t know the meaning of love until you’ve had kids.” There are a million ways to love.
Beneath all the grumbling, nervous questions, and smug, tsking disapproval runs an undercurrent of love. Grammar’s fans know that following (or thoughtfully breaking) certain rules of usage can add meaning, edge, emphasis, beauty.
If I had grown up with a father, even for a few years, maybe I would have been bold enough to separate more from my mother in my teens, go a little wild, stop worrying so much about her feelings. If I had grown up with a father, maybe I would have felt free to admit how much I missed having a father.
Attitudes toward unexpected change often run parallel when you are assessing risk or luck. Again, that locates luck squarely inside temperament. Are some of us lucky because we feel lucky? Would our “luck” change if we began to dwell on all we have missed, been prevented from doing, been cheated of by life’s vagaries? Does it increase because we give it more chances?
Corporate lawyers make a fortune tying the courts up with lawsuits over color trespass. Graphic designers lose their minds trying to figure out what colors are still fair game. Not even the speed of light is infinite, and the points along the spectrum will be used up pretty fast. We will run out of colors.
Rather than argue about the precise, magical moment that cells become a being or morality c % licks in a different direction, Japanese Buddhists simply accept the occasional need to stop new life before it develops further. They then turn to metaphor.
Even before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortions were hard to find or afford for many women, and the chance of losing abortion rights has loomed for decades. The most obvious difference between now and the years before Roe v. Wade, though, escaped me until I spoke with Heather Booth, a social justice activist who initiated the Jane Collective.
Six of Washington University’s plant-science biologists are female. They travel the world easily. Not one of them, to my knowledge, has had to shear off her hair and bind her breasts to do so.That was the trick used by Jeanne Baret, a self-taught herbalist who became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.