Decoding Modern Terms: Gender, Brunch, and Renovation
Expanding Your Vocabulary: A Journey Through Words
In the Chinese literary language, there are between 50,000 to 150,000 characters. For a tourist, knowing 400 characters is sufficient to ask for directions and understand a menu. Literate individuals know a minimum of 1,500-2,000 characters. With a knowledge of 3,000 characters, one can read a magazine, and knowing 6,000-8,000 characters makes one a highly educated citizen. If you think this is a lot, think again. For instance, Alexander Pushkin’s vocabulary consisted of 12,000-21,000 words. And Shakespeare’s works contain 200,000 words. However, there is a belief that Shakespeare was a brand under which an entire team worked, and the master of English literature himself invented some words. Well, writers can do that.
Understanding Gender and Sex
Sex education in Russia is rarely consistent. We don’t talk about stamens and pistils; instead, we have storks delivering babies and cabbage patches. As we grow and learn new and interesting things, we begin to understand ourselves not only physically but also analyze our position in society as men, women, or otherwise. This is where the story of sex and gender begins.
The Roots of Gender
The root “gen” has been scattered throughout linguistic history—it’s in genetics, gender as a verb denoting reproduction, and gen as a root meaning construction. In its modern sense, the word first appeared in world science in the mid-20th century.
The Simplicity of Sex
Sex is simpler; there are many legends, but the essence is that there were whole beings, and then they were divided for some reason and made to play strange sex games. Who “leads” is usually decided by the social system and norms. In some religions and legends, it’s the opposite: people are initially incomplete, and together they form a strong tandem that can exist productively. Esotericism tells us the same thing as Jung, many psychologists, and Eastern teachings: every person has feminine and masculine beginnings.
Gender: A Social Construct
Gender is not a fact of belonging to a particular sex but a set of social functions of an individual and their attitude towards themselves within the existing social labels or beyond them. This position is also found in animals. For example, in mammals, pregnancy is an immutable sign of female nature. However, male seahorses help their females and sometimes even carry and give birth to offspring.
Renovation and Reconstruction: What Happens to Buildings?
Architectural terms have confidently settled in everyday language and journalism over the past 10 years. It’s all about the freedom of information and democracy. For example, we elect a mayor who promises us the renovation of a historic building. Or they announce a month of ancient architecture in Russia, and as active citizens, we want to know all about it.
Renovation vs. Reconstruction vs. Restoration
What is the difference between renovation, reconstruction, and restoration? All these things can be done to a building. Well, not so easily—if the authorities allow it, the budget permits, and the craftsmen are found. However, each word, although similar in meaning to its neighbor, is fundamentally different from it.
By the way, this is one of the features of the Russian language: we have a lot of synonyms, huge rows, for example, shades of color. In some languages, blue is just blue. No azure or poetic romance.
For example, a girl at a cosmetologist:
- Botox (to remove forehead wrinkles) is restoration.
- Nose plastic surgery is reconstruction.
- Gender reassignment is renovation (although this is not an exact metaphor).
Seriously, let’s take a building. Suppose it’s a courthouse where some important process took place, and today it is highly valued as a symbol of law and power in the city. Tours are held here, and law graduates drink to brotherhood with professors after passing exams for a bright future.
Now imagine that the city decided to improve the condition of the building and invited a specialist to assess its preservation.
In the first option, the building is generally in order, but the marble staircase was damaged during the revolution: a large part of the step is missing, replaced by a wooden floor. And in the hall where some important document was signed, the stucco on the ceiling, gifted by the famous master Such-and-such-celli, has completely lost its appearance.
The master prescribes updating the stucco but using authentic materials, inviting restorers. And also to restore the staircase, but necessarily with the same type of marble. This is restoration. Restoration would also be a simple “update” of the building inside and out using the same materials and special tools used by antiquarians.
The second option showed that the building has perfectly preserved the facade and the parade staircase, as well as the meeting room. But everything else has become unusable. Moreover, the communication systems cannot cope with the current load, even if they are restored.
And the master decides on renovation—preserving the facade, staircase, and hall, while rebuilding everything else. There will be a lecture hall of one of the legal corps here. Inside, the building will become modern, carrying within it particles of the monument in its original form. Renovation is resorted to when the restoration of the entire building is unprofitable or extremely expensive, and it is threatened with demolition due to dilapidation.
For example, in St. Petersburg, a company preserved the facade of a building source.
