Traditionally associated with reason and intellect, it has long been part of our everyday parlance: we rack our brains, arrange brainstorms or brain dumps, take part in mind wandering, have our "minds blown", and when eating cold things, some of us even experience "brain freeze".
His books, and now the films of his books, have punctuated Anglophone childhood, and their characters, vocabularies and ditties have slipped into our common parlance.
In a Huffington Post article written in 2011, David Sirota says, "It seems to me that traditional 'liberals' in our current parlance are those who focus on using taxpayer money to help better society.
Whether Mr. Gould is writing about why the cartoonist Thomas Nast chose the elephant as the party mascot in Harper's Weekly or how "McCarthyism" crept into our national parlance, he is never boring.
I don't find accurate media portrayals of stillbirth to be, in our current parlance, triggering.
Ron Suskind's extraordinary 2004 article on the nature of the Bush administration introduced the term "reality-based community" to our political parlance.
Even our common parlance is filled with language alluding to the risk associated with the inefficiency of critical thought and reflection: "to hesitate is lost," "you snooze, you lose," and the most obvious, but least interrogated, "change or die".
And this giving away, or "loss of virginity" in our colloquial parlance, has to do with translating the conviction of what must be done, what gifts and talents must be given to the world, into the reality of earthly form.
One of them set in motion a republic founded on a hypocrisy that would end up having to fight a civil war four score and five years later and would have as one of its bloody climaxes, the bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil at Gettysburg that would then have the president come and essentially offer, in our modern parlance, the Declaration 2.0.
