Letters to the Editor
tohosa
Published Letters: 11 Editor's Choice: 1
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vocabulary
[Read the article: "Mrs. Henderson Presents"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]An aureola is a little aura, e.g., a nimbus or halo (as in a painting). An areola is a little area; in anatomy, an areola is small ring of color around a center portion, as the darker skin surrounding the nipple or the part of the iris surrounding the pupil. Pudenda has a nice, stuffy Latinate aura when you want to say "external genitalia," but its literal meaning is "stuff to be ashamed of." Vulva is a neutral (i.e., non-connotative) word for external female genitalia.
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What's the conflict?
[Read the article: What's in a hat?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And chances are, like Howard Fineman and Maureen Dowd, you thought he looked like a gangster. But that wasn't my reaction. What struck me was that Abramoff was wearing my hat, a Borsalino, the ne plus ultra of Yeshiva boy caps.
Won't Borsalino sell fedoras to the impious? "Gangster" and "Jewish" aren't mutually exclusive terms. Google will find you mug shots of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, e.g., in fine-looking hats.
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I needed to rethink "Gilligan's Island"
[Read the article: My parents are obsessed with genealogy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm not yet 60, but I'm a genealogy hobbyist who has sometimes been pretty obsessive. I've been part of the USGenWeb Project since 1997, I maintain a couple of big family databases and do lookups for people searching for other people. I've been interested in genealogy since I was a little girl looking through old albums at my grandma's house.
There's a genealogists' joke that men do genealogy to see how they're related to famous people and women do genealogy to see how they're related to their husbands. So far, I've identified seven sets of common ancestors with my husband among New England colonists, with the closest relationship being eighth cousins.
Our numerous common descents are not remarkable. About 40% of Americans are related to each other within the ninth degree. If you have any colonial ancestors, you're probably related to someone famous -- Cole Porter was my fifth cousin four times removed!!! Being related to famous Americans is just about random, so feeling superior or inferior on account of this is not logical.
My interest is fundamentally in how America works, how things got the way they are, stuff that I wasn't taught in school. I'm a native westerner, and I never had reason to think about Connecticut, but some days it seems like everybody came from Connecticut. The real lightbulb day for me was when I realized that Thurston Howell had two ancient Long Island names, yet, for all the history I'd taken in college, I hadn't ever learned this kind of social information, and now I needed to rethink "Gilligan's Island" and just about all of American literature.
I'm interested in how Americans got to the Pacific coast. From novels, movies, and TV we get the picture of the lone and isolated pioneers. But this isn't the way they did it -- they moved in big family groups, sometimes whole neighborhoods, sometimes church congregations. At other times I think it's pretty funny that my paternal ancestors and my husband's paternal ancestors, unknown to each other, left Massachusetts in the 1780's and made the Northern Tier migration over the next 150 years, with the result that, eventually, my darling and I could be high-school sweethearts in an isolated town in North Central Washington.
From another direction, as we get closer to the old-timers, they get more interesting. Their troubles and their achievements move us more deeply.
And, ever and always, dead relatives are a lot less trouble than live ones.
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Fuzzy terminology ;)
[Read the article: My vagina's school district]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Vulva" is the term for the external female genitalia, i.e., the labia majora, labia minora, clitoris, and vestibule of the vagina. The vagina is an internal organ.
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It's "strait-laced"
[Read the article: Rudy Giuliani, president (of Phi Rho Pi)]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]and it means tightly controlled.
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It's not in invisible ink, Cary.
[Read the article: My wife was having an emotional affair for years behind my back]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Cary said: "Apparently in the marriage contract there is a clause in invisible ink that says we must sever all our ties and mute all our needs and close all the windows and become what we are not in order to protect the inviolable envelope of the marriage contract."
Actually, in the traditional Protestant marriage vows, there is an explicit clause about this: "forsaking all others, keeping thee only unto him as long as you both shall live." Marriage is generally understood to be an exclusive relationship, which means the wife doesn't get to have boyfriends even if they make her happy.
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Your premise is faulty
[Read the article: War, chaos and Bush's faith]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Consider Alexander, Genghiz Khan, and the United States Army in World War II (cf. "There's A War To Be Won", by Geoffrey Perret).
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Mother's milk
[Read the article: Breasts at work]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Every time I read an article like this, I just wish that HUMAN milk, mother's milk, was not designated "breast milk," as if other organs lactated. Human milk should be our standard for feeding our infants, and then it wouldn't be necessary to differentiate between woman's milk and cow's milk.
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Vercet
[Read the article: Reason to believe]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's Versed.
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Cassandra
[Read the article: Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Cassandra was a Trojan princess who foretold the destruction of Troy and was not believed.