Money is a mystery. Not only is our behavior with respect to money sometimes puzzling and erratic, but our feelings about money are often contradictory, illogical, deep-rooted, and scarcely known even to our most secret selves. We are getting better at handling money, but what it means to us, how we use it to express ourselves, and how it can help us become all that we are meant to be remain murky issues.

Money is a response. We use it to express our social values, our gratitude, our appreciation, our pleasure, our support. Money gives us the ability to respond (response-ability), and its empowering use often defines the truly responsible among us.

Absolute freedom doesn't exist and never did. Just as we don't spit on the floor at work, swear at customers, or send out letters full of misspellings, so too we might have to 'watch our language.' It is odd that the request for unbiased language in schools and workplaces is considered intolerable when other limits on our freedom to do whatever we want are not.

Life seems somehow less shocking, painful, and lonely - and more hopeful, agreeable, and beautiful - when our experiences are confirmed by those of others. Although each of us is unique, there are familiar responses and doubts and joys that let us know we have kin. We are not, after all, too strange to live.

if there's one thing consistent about language it is that it is constantly changing. The only languages that do not change are those whose speakers are dead.

Although we have not assigned God a sexual orientation, a height, or eye color, we have thought nothing of assigning a gender and a religion (God always belongs to the same one we do).

Language both reflects and shapes society. Culture shapes language and then language shapes culture. Little wonder that the words we use to talk to each other, and about each other, are the most important words in our language: they tell us who I am, they tell us who you are, they tell us who 'they' are.