Monday, November 22, 2021

Monday musing ~ about words and ideas

In the United States we call this bird a TURKEY.
Turks call it HINDI (meaning from India).
In India, the bird is called PERU.
In Arabic, it's called GREEK CHICKEN.
In Greek, it's called FRENCH CHICKEN.
In French, it's called INDIAN CHICKEN.

I can only conclude that language is indeed a very strange thing!
What do YOU call it?
Personally, I call it delicious.

Mansplaining and clueless males

I'm on the mailing list for Patheos, and today's top article was "Mansplaining in the Bible, and a Woman Who Overcame It."  That was a new one for me, the idea that mansplaining can be found in the Bible.  Do you know what that word means?

Word of the Day
mansplaining /ˈmanˌsplāniNG/ noun (informal) = the explanation of something by a man, typically to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing.  Example:  A woman says to a man:  "Your response is classic mansplaining."
So where is this mansplaining in the Bible?  The article says it's in the Hebrew scriptures in the story of Hannah, a powerful and faithful woman who was surrounded by mansplaining and clueless males.  She was crying over her situation, and a priest (a man) assumed she must be drunk and told her to quit crying.  Did he know her situation?  Nope.  This looks to me more like a clueless male than one who is mansplaining.  Oh, well.  Maybe there's a better example somewhere else in the Bible.

I blogged about mansplaining in early 2019, where I said:
I'm interested in the #MeToo movement and how many women can say, "Me, too."  When I attended a recent panel discussion, I counted 31 of us in the room.  Only nine were men, but every one of them (except the silent young man who accompanied a woman on the panel) spoke up, some repeatedly.  One was a last-minute replacement for a woman who was supposed to be on the panel and couldn't be there.  I noticed the men would jump into the conversation without waiting for the moderator (a woman) to call on them, while women were raising their hands and waiting to be called on.  Fewer than half the women spoke at all.  Finally, I'd had enough.  I waited patiently, with my hand up, until the moderator called on me.  When I started talking about women needing to have a voice and men doing the talking about #MeToo, a man near me interrupted me (!!!).  So I stood up and continued to talk ABOVE him.  We women had come to discuss the #MeToo situation, not to have it "mansplained" to us, though I didn't use that word.  A woman came up to me afterwards to thank me for speaking up.

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