Boy flower or girl flower?
What is a freesia? Plus Grandfather's gaffe, and a beaver obsession.
Editor’s Note: I just received the printed copies of Animal Portraits, my newest book, and I’m so pleased with it. More details below and on my web site. —KT
PERSONAL HISTORY
A bubble bursts
THERE’S AN OLD doctor joke that goes like this: What’s the difference between God and a doctor? Answer: God doesn’t think he’s a doctor.
That joke fit my Grandfather Tremain to a T. He had a stern countenance and was a self-declared expert on most subjects. He generally regarded his grandchildren as nuisances in need of proper instruction. We learned to always call him “Sir” and to be quiet at the dinner table. We still remember his frequent command, “Don’t monkey!” Most of all, we were taught to be in awe of his doctor-ness.
Grandfather regarded my mother as lower class, an uneducated rube from West Virginia, though he was equally displeased when she went back to school and ultimately earned a Master’s degree. She usually played the deferential daughter-in-law, but never fully bought into the doctor-as-god bit. He put himself in charge of prescribing her birth control and of most other aspects of our family’s health care. After an unexpected sixth child, she went for a second opinion.
But I looked up to him. He had a den upstairs in their large St. Louis home where he sometimes let me listen to Cardinal games with him. In the den, I would run my eyes over the gleaming surgical tools laid out in a beautiful mahogany-and-glass case that he’d restored—one of his hobbies. The other was fixing watches and clocks. Listening to the chimes go off throughout the house on the quarter, half, and full hour was a keen pleasure of visiting our grandparents.
When I was eight or nine, a plantar wart appeared on the bottom of my foot. My grandfather sat me down in his living room and placed the foot on a mahogany stool with a needlepoint cushion. After examining me, he left and then returned a few minutes later with a device to burn off the wart. It resembled a small electric drill with a black plastic body, metal prongs attached in the front, and an electrical cord running out of the bottom. He also carried a spray can and extension cord. When he plugged in the device and pulled the trigger, a blue-and-orange spark sizzled forward like a ray gun. I spontaneously yanked my foot back. But he reassured me that with the new spray-on anesthetic he’d received from a drug rep, I’d feel no pain at all.
Since this was Irl George Tremain, M.D., I persuaded myself to believe him and inched my foot back onto the stool. Holding it in one hand, he lifted the heel slightly and thoroughly sprayed the affected area. We waited for a minute or two to let the anesthetic do its work. He then picked up the ray gun and shot me his look of confident authority one more time. Still holding my heel, he pulled the trigger and the burning spark met the sole of my foot.
Which burst into flames.
My foot on fire, I was too terrified to speak. I later learned that the anesthetic contained alcohol and wasn’t meant to be used near heat or flame. Back then, I just remember thinking, “This can’t be right!” And when I looked up at him, despite his best effort, the panic showed through. Fortunately, the alcohol burned off quickly and I wasn’t permanently scarred. But a spell was broken. For the first time in my young life, I’d seen behind the curtain of the all-powerful doctor. —Kerry Tremain
ON LANGUAGE
Men and women live in different words
A RECENT ARTICLE I read claimed that the ability to recognize certain words differs between men and women. Initially a bit incredulous, I did a little digging and found a study from a behavioral science journal that investigated this thesis. The differences they found weren’t huge in terms of overall vocabulary, but for certain words the statistical significance between genders was marked. Naturally I wanted to know which words they were talking about. Here are some examples.
“Male” words: Percent recognized by men / women
Howitzer 84/53
Gauss 64/31
Azimuth 58/27
Aileron 55/22
Boson 76/44
Parsec 83/44
“Female” words: Percent recognized by women / men
Chignon 72/24
Kohl 77/36
Espadrille 73/36
Freesia 72/27
Tulle 77/27
Whipstitch 71/37
Well! True, your vocabulary does reflect your world. A computer nerd knows a lot of programming words while a cook has more for baking. I’d never thought about gender differences in word recognition before, but was intrigued enough to break down the lists.
Howitzer, a massive gun, is clearly a guy thing, though I wouldn’t have guessed that only about half the women would know the word. A gauss is a unit of measurement related to magnetism, which seems obscure to me in a totally gender-neutral way. Yet a full sixty-three percent of men tested knew it. Do guys really sit around the locker room discussing magnetic flux density? The fog lifted when I heard about a popular computer game with a magnetic weapon called a gauss rifle. Aha! Another gun.
Azimuth stretched my brain. I knew only that it had something to do with direction. Determining an azimuth requires a compass, a tool I rarely ever used. Maybe Boy Scout training gives young males an awareness of azimuths that my Campfire Girls troop never provided.
Aileron stumped me. I thought it might be a chair, since several chair manufacturers use “aileron” as a brand name, but that’s pretty obscure. Aileron more commonly refers to the part of the airplane wing used to control lateral balance, and my ignorance of aviation is exceeded only by my ignorance of the compass.
The last two on the male list, boson and parsec, were easy. I love reading about subatomic physics and boson is one of the two most basic subatomic particles, the other being the fermion. You might easily guess that the fermion is named after Enrico Fermi, but what about the boson? Satyendra Nath Bose, a Bengali physicist, laid the foundation for quantum statistics. He could speak five languages and quoted Tennyson as easily as he did Rabindranath Tagore. Love me a Bengali polymath! And parsec? That’s a unit of measure in astronomy, roughly 3.26 light-years, which has no bearing on anything in my life, though knowing it does make it easier to listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Now for the female words, many of which involve personal adornment. A chignon is a hairstyle consisting of a low bun at the back of the head. No surprise that it’s a girly term, despite the unfortunate proliferation of man buns. Kohl was a type of eye makeup worn by Queen Hatshepsut in ancient Egypt and is still in use today. An espadrille is a fabric shoe with a rope sole that’s been worn in parts of Spain and France for hundreds of years. It’s a unisex fashion, but I was surprised to see that almost three-quarters of the American women surveyed recognized the word espadrille. Good for us, ladies.
A freesia is a kind of flower. Since gardening is a somewhat gender-neutral hobby, I wouldn’t have thought that nearly three times as many women as men would recognize the word. But freesias are mainly a cut flower in America, and women account for about eighty percent of all flower sales.
As a quilter, I’m keenly aware of the last two words on the female list. Tulle (pronounced “tool”) is a kind of translucent fabric best known as the material used to make ballet tutus. It’s easy to believe that the word has escaped the male gaze, despite men’s apparently widespread interest in ballerinas. Lastly, whipstitch is what you might guess: a kind of stitch used in sewing.
But do such variances truly signify anything of importance? Most of the examples are not everyday words. So from where I stand in my espadrilles, no, they don’t make a boson’s worth of difference. —Barbara Ramsey
For more on the fate of bosons and other subatomic characters, check out our fave, Elle Cordova, hanging out in the Universe Saloon with the mysterious Dark Energy.
NATURE STORIES
A lesson in narrative tension
LAST SUNDAY, for over half an hour, I watched an Instagram video of a beaver chewing on a pole. The video, filmed on a phone, was narrated in Japanese (and therefore incomprehensible to me) by a zookeeper at the Torius Friendly Petting Zoo in Hisayama. From the start, the pole—a foot in diameter and six feet tall with a human-carved beaver at the top—seemed on the verge of toppling.
The beaver had sharpened the upper and lower parts like a pencil. The point was no larger than a quarter, and I felt sure the pole would fall within a minute or two of chomping. Occasionally, a fenced-in goat could be seen in the background watching the action. Past the two-minute mark, the beaver was still chewing, but I hung on, waiting for the inevitable fall. Early hope arose when the beaver stepped away and moved behind a nearby bush. It seemed to be waiting at a safe distance for the pole to tumble.
But it didn’t fall. After a long minute, the beaver went back to work.
Instagram and YouTube videos differ in that the former has no play/pause slider and no fast forward. At the point on Instagram when the beaver returned to the pole, my pulse was running so high that I wanted to race to the end, but couldn’t. As a workaround, I pulled up YouTube on my laptop—I’d been watching on a desktop screen—and plugged in the terms “Torius Friendly Petting Zoo” and “beaver” while keeping an eye peeled to the bigger screen. No luck. The zoo has a YouTube page, but that video wasn’t posted. Google searches also failed.
By the time I’d given up on Google, a big-screen surprise appeared. The gnawing beaver stopped and waddled off, and a heretofore unseen second beaver took its place. With this new energy, the pole would surely fall straight away. The first one even took a few extra bites on the opposite side of the pole from its companion.
Though relieved by this second shift, I had a new worry. What if the heavy pole fell on the beavers? The zoo yard was small. And what about the poor goat, just a few feet away? Surely, I consoled myself, the zookeeper, who kept up a nonstop patter, had an inkling of where the pole would fall. The previously gnawed logs scattered about the yard were somewhat reassuring. And the beavers must know what they’re doing, right? Chewing logs is what they do.
Until they didn’t. With the pole still standing—though possibly listing a bit?—both beavers just wandered off. The narrator immediately tried coaxing them back to the pole with food pellets. After a tense couple of minutes, one of the beavers finally bit, and started gnawing away again, occasionally nudging the pole with its paw and shoulders. Mentally, I urged the beaver to push harder. Harder! I felt sure that would do the trick.
At this point, I looked at the clock to confirm that I’d been watching for a full half-hour. (A snarky comment below the post read, “Great video. Not long enough.”) I rush to add that I am no neophyte in these matters. Nature videos routinely appear in my feed. I recently watched a heron stabbing a foot-long salamander and then swallowing the whole damn thing. I’ve seen leopards tangling with crocs and elephants with lions. These mini-dramas last two to three minutes. Sometimes five. Never, ever, over thirty minutes. I wouldn’t watch a movie where so little happened over that amount of time. I’d get furious with the artsy-fartsy director and change channels.
But I had to see the pole fall. I had to. And eventually it did. When it came, the fall wasn’t violent or noisy. On the final bite, it quietly toppled over into the yard. As hoped, the beaver knew exactly where it would fall and stayed out of the way. The goat was safe. No animals were harmed in the making of this video.
The fall felt a bit anti-climactic, but I was glad to be taking whole breaths again. My relief was tinged with a mild self-loathing—did I really just sit here watching this for nearly forty minutes?—and also with amazement. I settled into a moment of introspection and philosophical pondering on the nature of storytelling. Those beavers and that cell-phone-holding zookeeper were clearly masters of narrative tension. As are the rival gangs of sparrows at our bird feeder. Perhaps, I thought, if you seek a captivating story, step outside. —Kerry Tremain
VIDEO OF THE WEEK
SPEAKING OF narrative tension, Snoop Dog takes us through perhaps the scariest two minutes of video ever recorded by Sir David Attenborough. An iguana hatchling must evade a field of killer snakes to make it to the water’s edge. Hold on to your seat.
BOOKS
THEY’RE HERE! And as beautifully printed as I’d hoped. This book, with forty-two sepia photographs of mammals and birds, is truly worth having. Order by clicking here or on the cover image above.
I love doctor jokes! Here's one on the theme of God and MDs: https://folklore.usc.edu/joke-34/
Found the list of male and female words fascinating, but I beg to differ about gardening being gender neutral, at least in the U.S. As a long time landscape designer and nursery"man", I assure you gardening is definitely a female dominant activity.