[HN Gopher] Words known better by males than females, and vice v...
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Words known better by males than females, and vice versa
Author : yurivish
Score : 449 points
Date : 2022-02-09 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (observablehq.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (observablehq.com)
| feintruled wrote:
| This startled me in the same way as a really excellent magic
| trick. You are convinced it's not going to catch you out, but
| then it does. I pride myself of having a wide vocabulary (or so I
| thought) and the premise sounded unlikely to me and yet I knew
| all the male words and didn't know the majority of the female
| words. What an eye opener!
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I actually knew most of the words; apparently though I'm in the
| minority of men for not knowing _taffeta_. After looking it up,
| I 'm slightly surprised that _tulle_ is so much lower than
| _taffeta_ given that both are used in gowns and I run into
| references to _tulle_ in poetry all the time[1].
|
| On the other hand, I am in good male company for being
| completely mystified by _peplum_ only to find it 's another
| word for "overskirt."
|
| I'm also in the 1/8 of all men in not recognizing the word
| _shemale_ , though if wikipedia is right it's just she-male
| missing the hyphen? Perhaps I was primed by all of the fashion
| words but I read it with a french pronunciation...
|
| 1: e.g. https://poets.org/poem/because-i-could-not-stop-
| death-479 (written by a woman)
| kelnos wrote:
| I had the same thought! I (rather arrogantly) assumed that I
| would know most or all of the "female" words. Turned out I
| recognized less than half, and could define only a couple.
| Yajirobe wrote:
| Meh, the female ones don't seem to be English (at least a lot
| of them). The male ones are mostly international words.
| dymk wrote:
| If they're not English, aren't the female words also
| international words then too? Why's that meh?
| eckmLJE wrote:
| they're all english
|
| - peplum - late 17th century: via Latin from Greek peplos .
|
| - boucle - late 19th century: French, literally 'buckled,
| curled'.
|
| - pessary - late Middle English: from late Latin pessarium,
| based on Greek pessos 'oval stone' (used in board games).
|
| - doula - 1960s: modern Greek, from Greek doule 'female
| slave'.
|
| - chignon - late 18th century: from French, originally 'nape
| of the neck', based on Latin catena 'chain'.
|
| - tulle - early 19th century: from Tulle, a town in SW
| France, where it was first made.
|
| etc
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| blueflow wrote:
| Having had latin in school, i understood some of the female
| words via their latin word roots.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Interesting, doule in modern greek just means work.
|
| Doula is one I would have never known had it not been for
| the pregnant women in my life.
| abrezas wrote:
| Doula (doula) in modern Greek is female slave.
| [deleted]
| brimble wrote:
| The female words are largely romance language loan words
| because they're related to textiles and fashion and, in the
| English speaking world, France and Italy dominate those
| fields (or did for a long enough time, historically, that
| tons of the terminology comes from their languages, anyway).
|
| They're still English.
| jolen33 wrote:
| I don't know how much flak I will get for making a comment like
| this, but feel it's important to point out the data is obviously
| biased for (or at least the article doesn't specifically call
| out):
|
| 1. Western society's influence 2. Cultural background influence
| 3. Sex assigned at birth influence
| heurisko wrote:
| > 3. Sex assigned at birth influence
|
| I'm not on-board with appropriating literature on DSDs, where
| sex was to some extent "assigned" in cases of ambiguity.
|
| It's an appropriation that serves a political viewpoint that
| sex as an internal feeling, rather than a reality that is
| recorded; not assigned.
| jl6 wrote:
| Wish we had more females commenting here. For what it's worth, my
| wife knew hardly any of the "female" words either.
| ramshorns wrote:
| It might still be a biased sample. Probably most people on this
| website regardless of gender are interested in science and
| technology.
| janeerie wrote:
| One data point here - I knew all the female words and 15 of the
| male words. I definitely feel more confident about what the
| female ones mean, though.
| quus wrote:
| I did not know "strafe" which I guess a lot of guys do?
|
| "Gauss" I just thought of the mathematician; forgot it was a
| science thing.
|
| I'm not at all sure what to make of where "shemale" ranks
| Hjfrf wrote:
| Strafe in shooter games is a movement relative to the direction
| you're facing without turning.
|
| So on a standard two-stick controller layout your left stick is
| strafe and your right is aim.
|
| I expect more people have played halo than flown planes.
| vlozko wrote:
| Strafe a pretty commonly used word when dealing with
| first/third person shooter video games. Probably self
| explanatory why more guys know it.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I think strafing has something to do with combat aircraft (a
| strafing run, probably fly by shooting?), but where I know it
| from, is early shooters (haven't played any in over a decade,
| not sure if that word is still used), strafing was moving
| sideways.
|
| edit: my guess for the actual meaning was close-ish:
|
| > Strafing is the military practice of attacking ground targets
| from low-flying aircraft using aircraft-mounted automatic
| weapons
|
| > The word is an adaptation of German strafen, to punish,
| specifically from the humorous adaptation of the German anti-
| British slogan Gott strafe England (May God punish England),
| dating back to World War I.
|
| -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafing
|
| And I might as well post the gaming page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafing_(video_games)
| thelopa wrote:
| Re "shemale": I wonder what other slurs they included in the
| data set. I have a hard time believing "shemale" is the only
| slur with gender polarization.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| "Shemale" is such a great punchline.
|
| I was reading these thinking "Oh fuck, I know all the male
| words and none of the female ones, I'll never pass as a woman
| with a vocabulary like this".
|
| At the bottom, "Shemale". Tada! That's why I know all the male
| words! I'm a sh**ale!
| jedberg wrote:
| Like a lot of other commenters here, I knew all the male words
| and some of the female ones (which I mostly picked up after we
| started trying to have children or actually had them), but what I
| found most interesting was going down the list of words and
| getting stumped at exactly the spot where more women than men
| know the word (but now I know what chambray is!).
| zwieback wrote:
| I'm a techno-nerd guy but knew all those fabrics most guys
| apparently don't. In my early 20s I was really into sewing, which
| is fascinating from an engineering perspective, highly recommend
| as a hobby to get you away from that monitor. Both the tools and
| processes used in sewing are really interesting.
| burnished wrote:
| Most of the fabric words I have distinct memories, as an adult,
| of asking some one (usually a woman) what the word meant. Tulle
| in particular was hilariously difficult to figure out.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >Tulle in particular was hilariously difficult to figure out.
|
| Tulle is just orange bags, but not orange. The more you know.
| AndriyKunitsyn wrote:
| I wonder what it means to "know" a word.
|
| If I know that progesterone is some kind of a hormone, but I have
| no idea what it does, do I know this word?
| raydev wrote:
| There are several words in this chart that I cannot associate
| with _anything_ , nor recall having seen them before. At least
| personally, I would say I know a word by knowing under what
| context it can be used, and I don't even have that.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Weird choice of vocabulary to study - fabric and fashion words
| stressed for women, and techno-babble for men. Was the vocabulary
| completely random, or was this result forced by anticipating the
| outcome?
| function_seven wrote:
| Random. The results shown here are the words with the largest
| disparity between the sexes. The total list was almost 62,000
| words.
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Thanks for the link. Here's a little bit of detail about
| their sample gathering, which I found interesting:
|
| _The test was made available on a dedicated website
| (http://vocabulary.ugent.be/). Access to the test was
| unlimited. Participants were asked whether English was their
| native language, what their age and gender were, which
| country they came from, and their level of education. For the
| present purposes, we limited the analyses to the first three
| tests taken by native speakers of English from the USA and
| the UK.Footnote 1 All in all, we analyzed the data of 221,268
| individuals who completed 265,346 sessions. Of these, 56%
| were completed by female participants and 44% by male
| participants._
|
| The site encourages participation with a hook similar to that
| used by many online quizzes:
|
| _Word test
|
| How many English words do you know? With this test you get a
| valid estimate of your English vocabulary size within 4
| minutes and you help scientific research._
|
| Is this a representative sample? I doubt it. Probably it went
| viral in some specific communities.
|
| Maybe there's still something interesting to learn from it...
| but I'd take it with a grain of neodymium.
| [deleted]
| onion2k wrote:
| The "male" words aren't technobabble though. They're just
| scientific language. The data certainly seems to very clearly
| represent the impact of the historical bias in education,
| entertainment, and _the world in general_ to emphasise
| "science" as a pursuit for males and "craft" as a pursuit for
| girls.
| newsbinator wrote:
| Not necessarily clearly external bias. I can think of an
| alternate possible explanation.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| If technobabble, I'd be disappointed to not see "interposer"
| or "hash table" listed.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| "Historical bias in education" seems like a bad justification
| that just draws on modern buzz words. Girls outperform boys
| in every subject in school, science included, and always have
| in our modern education system (last century or so). The idea
| that girls are getting worse education is not plausible.
|
| On the other hand, there is an obvious explanation, which, I
| feel all of us with sufficient exposure to both genders must
| know - which is that women tend to be more interested in
| fabrics and fashion and better learn that vocabulary while
| men are more interested in the science (or science fiction)
| and technical terms and learn that vocabulary.
|
| https://time.com/81355/girls-beat-boys-in-every-subject-
| and-...
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > On the other hand, there is an obvious explanation,
| which, I feel all of us with sufficient exposure to both
| genders must know -
|
| I read this and immediately assumed you were going to say
| its obvious that women are taught how to behave, and that
| they're taught things related to what they're supposed to
| know.
|
| Your comment alone is enough proof that society is _telling
| women they aren 't supposed to like science_. Any young
| engineer reading HN may start/continue to subconsciously
| question their affinity to the field.
|
| Women ARE taught that they don't belong in stem fields, and
| that science is not for them. I was picking out books for a
| 5yo girl and boy twins for christmas recently, and the nice
| lady at the bookstore told me to get a glittery princess
| book for the girl and a scientist book for the boy. It was
| not a malicious act meant to keep women out out science,
| but just something we take for granted in society. Fromm a
| young age we tell girls what is and isn't for them,
| subconsciously.
|
| IEEE has studied the affects of engineering graduation and
| job retention, and its correlated to a womens self-identity
| as an engineer and their perception that they belong.
| Starting from a young age, society is damaging that
| perception. I'll link one study, but they've done a number
| of studies, including tracking workplace treatment of
| coworkers, and women are consistently treated worse and are
| questioned more and trusted less.
|
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5673614
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Quick question: In which societies on Earth is this trend
| reversed? Since women's relative disinterest in science
| apparently comes from society, and there are many
| societies on Earth, surely there are some societies in
| which women are more interested in science than men,
| right?
|
| All of this stuff seems like obvious post hoc
| rationalization. You know girls aren't taught to be
| engineers because relatively few engineers are women. Are
| we socializing young girls to be accountants, claims
| adjusters, or advertising specialists? If girls are just
| reading sparkly books about princesses where do they get
| the idea to become accountants? (Accountants, by the way,
| are close to an even split on gender)
|
| The survey you cite is pretty meaningless. They survey
| some engineering freshman and then find a few questions
| where the results are statistically different between men
| and women.
|
| "We conducted t-tests to determine gender differences in
| survey responses. We found that women tended to have
| lower self-efficacy perceptions: they reported less
| confidence in their ability to complete the physics
| requirements (5.75 vs. 6.13, p < .05), less confidence
| that they could do well in an engineering major during
| the current academic year (5.75 vs. 6.07, p < .05), and
| less confidence that they could complete any engineering
| degree at this institution (5.08 vs. 5.41, p < .05). In
| contrast, women reported higher outcome expectations than
| men: they reported greater agreement with the statement
| that engineering will allow them to find a well-paying
| job (6.48 vs. 6.33, p < .05), and that doing well at math
| would increase their sense of self-worth (5.66 vs. 5.46,
| p < .05). "
|
| So - women tended to have less confidence but higher
| expectations for their career and that's supposed to be
| evidence that society teaches women they can't be
| engineers?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > You know girls aren't taught to be engineers because
| relatively few engineers are women
|
| No its clearly that there are few engineers who are women
| because we teach them they shouldn't be. You got it
| backwards. There is ample evidence of this.
|
| > Accountants, by the way, are close to an even split on
| gender
|
| Thank you for this example, by the way. I've never seen a
| single children's book on accounting, and its pretty
| even. I've seen lots on science, doctors, construction,
| nursing, etc. And they're pretty non-even careers.
|
| > If girls are just reading sparkly books about
| princesses where do they get the idea to become
| accountants?
|
| Because sparkly princess is not a job and most people
| need a job. We're not teaching anyone to be an accountant
| from a young age and people do it because it interests
| them. But when we teach only men to be engineers... we
| get a gender imbalance.
|
| > Quick question: In which societies on Earth is this
| trend reversed?
|
| This is a really weak argument. 1. There are plenty of
| matriarchal societies throughout history. 2. The identity
| of science as we see it in western society today is a
| relatively western idea that doesn't translate well
| historically. Euro-mediterranian history dominates our
| cultures idea of science, and that cultural history is
| male-leader dominated. Plenty of societies across the
| world had women do things, but we just learn about what
| happened in Europe (from men).
|
| As you said in another comment, women outperform men at
| school, so why do they have lower confidence? That seems
| like a discrepancy that has a logical social explanation
| (they're told they don't belong, so they aren't confident
| in their work). Studies have proven this. Unless you
| think women are unconfident as a matter of biology?
| (studies have not proven this)
|
| Aside, have you ever talked to a female engineer? MANY
| will tell you they were not pushed to be an engineer, and
| that they face sexism and were constantly told they're
| not supposed to be there. Many experience higher levels
| of criticism and mistrust over their work compared to
| male coworkers.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Quick question: In which societies on Earth is this
| trend reversed?
|
| Iran, oddly enough; about 70% of STEM graduates are
| women.
|
| More generally, though, the trend in the west has been,
| for any given subject, it's all male, then there are one
| or two women, then a few more, and suddenly a tipping
| point is hit and it's 50/50 within a few years. This
| happened to medicine and later biology and then chemistry
| in most places. I'd expect the pattern to continue.
| bccdee wrote:
| > women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion
|
| Why? There are only two possible answers: Either there's
| some sort of genetic predisposition for women to care about
| fashion (quite a claim!), or that disposition is a product
| of the way we raise girls.
|
| Given that we _know_ our culture strongly associates
| fashion with women, and we _don 't_ have any evidence for
| some "fashion gene," historical bias in how we rear our
| children is simply the least presumptuous hypothesis
| available to us.
| User23 wrote:
| If we view fashion as part of an effective female mating
| strategy, which it observably is, then it's unsurprising
| that success at that intrasexual competition would be
| selected for.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| If we were to enter a mental clean room where nothing we
| knew of life on Earth could accompany us, and then sit
| and speculate about the nature of men and women, I agree
| that we would have no reason to suspect an interest in
| fashion might be related to biology. At least, I doubt I
| would come up with the connection.
|
| In reality we know that there are biological differences
| between men and women. We know these differences affect
| the brain in terms of size and structure. We know these
| differences affect the mind in terms of personality and
| emotional experience. Should we expect that men and women
| have identical biological predispositions towards areas
| of interest? I would say no. Given that we then expect to
| find differences of interest stemming from biology, and
| that we have found a difference in interest, and that
| there isn't a plausible alternative...
| bccdee wrote:
| > Given that we then expect to find differences of
| interest stemming from biology, and that we have found a
| difference in interest, and that there isn't a plausible
| alternative...
|
| There _is_ a more plausible alternative though. Our
| society demonstrably raises boys and girls differently,
| and we know for a fact that the way we raise children
| affects who they are. In fact, women were much more
| common in the field of computer science until a cultural
| shift around the '80s that saw computers portrayed as
| "boy toys" [1], so we know this affects things as complex
| as career aspirations too.
|
| Contrast that plausible and well-supported hypothesis
| with the other one: "There are biological differences
| between men and women. They affect many things. Therefore
| it's plausible that there is some effect on personal
| interest. Therefore it's safe to assume that any given
| difference in personal interests between sexes can be
| attributed to biology." This isn't even logically sound;
| it's fallacious to say that, if X affects Y, any
| behaviour exhibited by Y is likely attributable to X.
|
| And this is still all a-priori non-empirical reasoning;
| there's no evidence that sex is responsible for areas of
| interest at such a granular level as this, while we do
| have such evidence for culture (e.g. pink used to be a
| boys' colour [2]).
|
| [1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-
| happened-all-... [2]:
| https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/colorscope-pink-
| boy-gi...
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Person 1: I've just measured a thousand men and women.
| I've found that men are typically taller than women. This
| is because our society systematically underfeeds infant
| girls so they don't grow to be as tall as their male
| counterparts.
|
| Person 2: That's horrible! Is there any evidence of this
| systematic underfeeding?
|
| P1: None at all.
|
| P2: But, society at large tacitly endorses the practice
| of underfeeding young girls?
|
| P1: Not at all. In fact, it would be a horrible scandal
| and a severe and rare crime if anyone were found to be
| intentionally depriving an infant girl of nutrition.
|
| P2: So... why do you think this is the explanation for
| height differences?
|
| P1: Well, it would explain my results in a way that
| accords with my political beliefs.
|
| Your argument seems similar to Person One's argument.
| There just is no evidence that we are not educating girls
| fairly in science or any other domain. As I've previously
| referenced girls outperform boys in science (as well as
| every other subject) and have for the last century. It
| would, in fact, be a huge scandal if some school system
| were found to be educating girls differently.
|
| You are pointing at these really small things, like
| commercials targeting toys to boys versus girls. You
| assume that these small things cause major changes (as
| opposed to companies targeting their commercials where
| they find they get the best return). You ignore giant
| influences like the education system which does a better
| job educating young girls in science and math than boys.
| bccdee wrote:
| > Is there any evidence of this systematic underfeeding?
|
| I provided evidence that our cultural ideas of what
| careers are and aren't masculine impacts women's
| interests in terms of career path. You provided no
| evidence that interests are a product of sexed brain
| chemistry. Your height analogy makes no sense and doesn't
| match up to our discussion.
|
| > There just is no evidence that we are not educating
| girls fairly in science or any other domain.
|
| I never argued that schools discriminate against women by
| offering them a worse education in those areas. I argued
| that our culture encourages certain interests above
| others in boys and girls by gendering those interests.
| Consider the example I linked, where the number of women
| pursuing careers in computer science fell precipitously
| after messing with computers became coded as a "boy
| hobby."
|
| > You ignore giant influences like the education system
| which does a better job educating young girls in science
| and math than boys.
|
| Girls get higher marks than boys in every subject, and
| the discrepancy is actually less pronounced in STEM
| fields [1]. But this is really irrelevant to our
| discussion.
|
| [1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/girls-
| get-better-...
| sharikous wrote:
| Have you been around babies and small children? Or spoken
| with someone who has raised them?
|
| Differences in character are evident between children,
| and statistical differences between boys and girls are
| very visible.
|
| Your argument has a flaw. It's right we don't have
| evidence for the fashion gene but it's also right we know
| the female and male brain are different and behaviors are
| different (even if we cannot pinpoint the cause of the
| difference we see different behavior). It is sufficient
| to consider the genetic explanation as possible.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You're dismissing millennium due to a generation of
| reasonable parity in education, and entirely dismissing
| culture passed between generations of women. My grandmother
| wouldn't really know any of those fabric words, she grew up
| on a plantation in the 30s. Probably means she's not a
| woman.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > which is that women tend to be more interested in fabrics
| and fashion
|
| So, this is actually quite a modern phenomenon. At some
| point in the early 19th century, high status menswear
| started evolving into a near-uniform (it's finally started
| to pull away again a bit in the last few decades), while
| women's clothes started going in the opposite direction,
| especially in the early 20th century. But before that, high
| fashion was very much a male-focused thing. If someone in
| 1750 in Europe was obsessed with different fabric types,
| they'd be likely to be a wealthy man.
|
| (For an example of this, see Pepys' Diary; he goes on about
| fashion constantly.)
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I don't believe we have anywhere near the data needed to
| reliably describe the vocabulary or interests of the
| people of the 19th century. Most of all history is
| narrowly focused on the goings on of elites - which may,
| or may not be broadly representative. I don't think we
| have quantitative studies or surveys of populations from
| that time.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Oh, yeah, we basically only have what the elites wrote.
| Fashion would generally have been an elite thing then,
| though; it simply wasn't accessible to normal people.
| not2b wrote:
| Not just craft, for "doula" there's a reason women know that
| word more than men do.
| dnautics wrote:
| pessary too, though oddly, I knew that one.
| SilasX wrote:
| Same (male) but only because it came up in the context of
| reading Wikipedia deep dives that led to court cases
| blocking their import[1] and the Hippocratic oath, which,
| oddly enough, prohibits administering them (along with
| abortion):
|
| "Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause
| abortion."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath#Earliest_s
| urv...
|
| Edit: But even then, I didn't know e.g. what they looked
| like, or anything _about_ them specifically.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Pa
| ckage_o...
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Or the innate biological preferences caused by biological
| sex?
|
| Even baby male monkeys prefer to play with trucks while baby
| female monkeys prefer to play with dolls.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755553/
| uncomputation wrote:
| > dolls
|
| Small clarification: the feminine-analogous toys used in
| the original (Hasset, 2008 [1]) study were plush rather
| than the more common plastic dolls sold to children.
| Although the difference may or may not be minor, it does
| remind me of the famous Harlow monkey experiment where
| monkeys showed a preference for the soft "mother" figure
| over the biologically sustenance "mother" figure.
|
| Edit: Another commenter has already perpetuated this very
| misunderstanding it seems. Out of the Hasset female-coded
| toys, only one (a Raggedy Ann doll) was "anthropomorphic."
| All six others were animals.
|
| [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/
| bccdee wrote:
| These aren't trucks and dolls though. It's a pretty big
| leap from "female monkey babies prefer anthropomorphic
| toys" to "adult women are biologically predisposed to a
| deeper understanding of textiles." A cultural explanation
| is much more parsimonious.
| quocanh wrote:
| I think the point is that a significant part (majority?)
| of our culture is defined by our biology and nearly all
| is at least influenced by biology.
|
| The ultimate counterexamples would be societies where
| women are in charge of the engineering/construction and
| to my knowledge there are none which is a sign that
| there's something deep within our psyche which drives
| these interests. I'd love to hear counterexamples if
| anyone has them though.
|
| If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure out how
| to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord knows we've
| been trying.
| bccdee wrote:
| > a significant part (majority?) of our culture is
| defined by our biology
|
| That's a very strong claim. Obviously everything's
| _influenced_ by biology to some extent (imagine what
| society would look like if we had no thumbs), but "to
| some extent" is doing a lot of legwork there, and it's
| quite a reach to say that the majority of our culture is
| defined by biology based on that.
|
| Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields --
| how many societies have had engineers? Ours plus Rome
| plus not many others. But look at something like cooking,
| which _is_ old: There 's tons of weird gender stuff there
| that varies between societies. Why is grilling masculine
| if baking is feminine? Other societies have similarly odd
| gender-food rules too.
| quocanh wrote:
| I'd settle for any society where women built the huts.
| Nearly every society has needed to construct some form of
| shelter or build some sort of tool. Basketweaving comes
| to mind.
|
| Grilling and baking are great examples of what I'm
| talking about. Actually, in the past baking was seen as a
| _masculine_ activity. Ovens used to be much more
| dangerous than now. You had a dedicated town Baker just
| like you had a Blacksmith. Over time with the invention
| of gas and electric appliances and the proliferation of
| cheap baked goods, baking became a luxury. Now it 's a
| _feminine_ activity. If danger determines masculinity
| /femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is
| considered _masculine_. I 'm sure there's a biological
| explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger
| (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by
| it.
|
| To find some sort of culture that isn't influenced by
| biology, we would have to find some aspect of culture
| that we invented in our heads. For example, religion or
| philosophy or law. There are a ton of examples out there.
| But when we examine the culture that organically forms, I
| think there's a biological explanation for most of it.
| Maybe even all.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I 'm sure there's a biological explanation out there
| for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't
| mind it) while women are repelled by it._
|
| I think you have the motivations a little incorrect. My
| guess would be that men traditionally took care of the
| dangerous jobs because they wanted to protect the child-
| bearing members of society from them. As a fertile man,
| you're more likely to pass on your genes if you keep
| women out of harm's way.
|
| So yes, this does count as a "biological reason" for men
| and women going different ways, but you seemed to be
| implying that these biological reasons had more to do
| with brain structure and development, which I don't think
| is supported by what we know.
| quocanh wrote:
| But you have to ask why men step up to take the dangerous
| jobs? We didn't sit down and have a Socratic discussion
| about who takes which job. I posit that it's more than
| merely logic, that the motivations are rooted in our
| intuition.
|
| It's also simply not true that this is not supported by
| what we know. "Common sense" says that men die younger
| than women. And indeed we can find statistical proof of
| this wherever we go. Take car accidents. No one wants to
| get into a car accident. Yet men are 3x more likely to
| die in car accidents than women.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/192074/drivers-in-
| fatal-...
|
| Getting into car accidents yourself doesn't prevent
| child-rearing members of society from getting into car
| accidents of their own. What else explains this gender
| difference? Maybe men have worse vision? Worse reaction
| time? Are women stronger at turning the wheel than men?
| Maybe men are more distractable than women? I think not.
| People who have been driven by both mom and dad know: men
| drive more dangerously than women do.
|
| Every statistic related to safety shows that men are more
| willing to get into danger than women. Even in suicide
| rates, men are more likely to succeed, even with women
| trying _more often_.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190313-why-more-men-
| kil...
|
| There are so many examples like this. It's almost
| certainly true that men have a higher predilection for
| danger compared to women that is driven by some
| biological factor. If you think it's not the mind, then
| you would have to come up with a different explanation
| for every disparate piece of evidence out there. Not that
| it's impossible, but there's a simpler conclusion to
| draw.
| Jensson wrote:
| There are significant behavioural differences between the
| sexes in basically every animal. Even among mice the
| males are more inquisitive and take more risks than the
| females, so you find many more males than females in
| traps etc. Female animals tend to care much more about
| children. There is no reason to believe that humans
| evolved past this and all our differences are just us
| planning it out rationally.
| bccdee wrote:
| > If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that
| would also explain why grilling is considered masculine.
|
| I think this is motivated reasoning. From what I can
| tell, the "grilling is manly" thing started in the '50s
| (well after cooking stopped being dangerous) and is
| mostly limited to the United States (instead of being
| universal, as we would expect with something
| biologically-motivated). And what's the difference
| between frying, roasting, and grilling? All involve using
| a gas-operated cooking device to cook meat (assuming you
| own a gas stove); they're all equally safe.
|
| Not only does this strike me as being cultural, this
| strikes me as _obviously_ cultural. And yet you dismiss
| that out of hand and go looking for a biological
| explanation ( "grilling is extra dangerous") that doesn't
| really line up with the facts of the example. So it seems
| to me that you're engaging in motivated reasoning --
| assuming that masculinity _can 't_ be a product of
| culture, reaching for biological explanations even when
| they don't really make sense.
| quocanh wrote:
| The discussion here is: what parts of culture are
| motivated by biology? It's obviously cultural. But what
| is motivating the culture?
|
| Also interesting to me that grilling is manly started in
| the 50's. That seems to be about the time that household
| appliances like microwave were getting popular, no? Maybe
| men who liked to cook needed to find a manly outlet.
| caeril wrote:
| > Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields
|
| The mental tasks required of engineering are far, far,
| far, older. Things like abstract reasoning, distance
| estimation and measurement, rotation and scaling of
| objects, maps, and abstract shapes in one's head, ability
| to standardize and compute measures and weights, etc,
| were all adaptations that improved our effectiveness at
| hunting, building shelter, and both defense against, and
| offense toward, opposing tribes.
|
| Modern engineering is an enormous pile of abstractions on
| top of "Grog think rock weigh seven stick".
| Kye wrote:
| >> _" If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure
| out how to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord
| knows we've been trying."_
|
| It's only a mystery if you ignore the ample writing and
| research on the topic. Most people don't want to be
| somewhere they're not wanted. This also impacts men in
| fields they don't dominate like nursing and K-12
| education, so it's got nothing to do with stereotypes
| about how different gender assignments cope with
| adversity (the usual thing wheeled out to explain it).
| quocanh wrote:
| 1) I think it's worth removing all gender-based forms of
| adversity from every field. These do exist in STEM fields
| in the forms of biases and microaggressions. It's not
| evil - it's human. It's just what naturally happens when
| a field is dominated by one group and our minds forms
| patterns. We must always take a conscious effort to
| combat it.
|
| 2) Women may not be interested (organically) in certain
| STEM fields. It's still worth figuring out if we can
| change that. Only after understanding what it would take
| should we have a discussion of if its worth it. The
| benefits are real. Every field could benefit from having
| more diversity in perspectives - just like every species
| benefits from having diversity in traits.
| convolvatron wrote:
| computing used to literally be womens work.
| superdisk wrote:
| Computing back then was more like typing numbers into
| machines rather than writing software. It's akin to
| typewriting jobs which were also dominated by women.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
| quocanh wrote:
| I don't know much about computing as a profession, but
| wasn't it just algorithmic arithmetic?
| convolvatron wrote:
| yes. but perhaps more apropos I am old enough to have met
| some of the women programmers (not calculators) from the
| earlier generation when I started in the 80s. its
| completely anecdotal, and you may attribute this to many
| factors, but the likelihood that someone I met was more
| competent, informed, and/or more clever than I was
| greater for females than males.
| quocanh wrote:
| Well it's not about who is more clever. I think the
| research shows that its pretty even between men and women
| after all is said and done. It's about what naturally
| interests us and there are differences there.
| convolvatron wrote:
| maybe. I just have seen a time when it wasn't unusual to
| see a highly-regarded and competent woman in software.
| not that they were the majority. so I'm alot less
| inclined to just accept that there are important genetic
| differences that inherently make women less suitable for
| that kind of work.
|
| maybe team genetic-differences should be adopting the
| burden of proof
| Jensson wrote:
| My grandmother was a programmer working at a university,
| so I know. Nobody here said women aren't suited for that
| type of work. It is just that when video games became
| mainstream in the 80's you saw an avalanche of boys
| wanting to learn to program, and ever since then the
| field has skewed heavily male, like most other
| engineering fields where you build things that moves. My
| grandmother might have been a programmer, but she was
| never interested in computers as a hobby, it was just
| work to her.
|
| Note that the number of women entering the field didn't
| decrease, it was just the number of men increasing so
| much.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| mcguire wrote:
| The ability to recognize verbena as a word is not encoded
| on the X chromosome.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Are you sure there's not a gene for fabric preferences?
| noasaservice wrote:
| It is _your_ job to prove that.
|
| It is not our job to disprove your half-baked
| suppositions.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Its HN so you never know with things like this, but i
| think it was a joke meant to emphasize the ridiculousness
| of the argument that women are genetically predisposed to
| liking fabric craft.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| No, but the preferences and life choices that would lead
| to someone being exposed to and learning that word are in
| part due to sex dimorphism.
| [deleted]
| BeefWellington wrote:
| There are other differentiating factors there that could
| lead to the preference choice that are not related to
| whether something is mechanical in nature. Things like
| color, texture, etc. have been shown to have strong biases
| between the sexes.
|
| A possible control they did not employ during the study
| would be to have a series of toys that were identical in
| all ways except color, for example.
|
| Also *very* worth noting: As shown in
| their Fig. 1, when play time with toys is examined in human
| children (Berenbaum and Hines,1992) and rhesus macaques of
| all ages, males spend significantly more of their play time
| with the "male" toy(s) than with the female toy(s), while
| females spend about equal times with "male" and "female"
| toys. This is true both for frequency of interactions and
| in time spent playing (Hassett et al., 2008). **Therefore,
| one key difference between males and females in these
| studies is that males actually show a toy preference while
| females do not!**
|
| (Emphasis mine)
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I have my doubts that most people can give a correct
| definition for those scientific words. So even if one person
| is familiar with the general area, it doesn't say much about
| their education. Perhaps about their preferences in media.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > historical bias
|
| How historical are you going back here? I'm almost 50 years
| old and as far back as I can remember, everybody with any
| authority was working non-stop to teach science to girls and
| crafts to guys - even to the point of rejecting guys from
| science classes.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm almost 50 years old and I don't recognize your
| childhood.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| I'm not sure where you lived but geography and politics
| likely plays a factor here.
|
| It absolutely wasn't this way when I did my schooling and
| I'm younger than you, growing up in Canada.
|
| Another point to consider, aiming at a target doesn't mean
| hitting it. It's why you haven't seen the outcry about boys
| in stem until the past half decade or so. General public
| opinion and culturally ingrained sexism are very difficult
| boats to steer.
| nick__m wrote:
| I am sure it's a regional thing as I experienced that
| part of his statement: everybody with any
| authority was working non-stop to teach science to girls
|
| but I cannot say the same on that one:
| crafts to guys - even to the point of rejecting guys from
| science classes.
| dnautics wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that in most of my science classes
| (biochemistry/biology), outside of advanced grad-level
| organic synthesis, which then had a "fighter pilot
| jock"-vibe, the gender ratio was 50/50 _if not more female
| than male_ , so this trend goes back 20+ years. But if you
| look at the list, the scientific terms skew physics, and
| for... cultural reasons, I suspect the non-specialist
| penetration of a lot of those terms probably skews male.
| djur wrote:
| Exactly. Many respondents who know "parsec" don't know it
| because they're astronomers, they know it because the
| Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than twelve
| of 'em.
| bitwize wrote:
| Or, in second place, because you played the game on
| TI-99/4A.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than
| twelve of 'em
|
| That's a good point - I wonder if the question was "do
| you recognize this word?" or "can you correctly define
| this word?" (followed by a quick check)
| djur wrote:
| This study uses self-reported recognition of the word.
| Later in the study they compare their results to other
| tests that try to identify understanding of the words'
| meaning.
|
| I also wonder if there's any gender differential between
| male and female respondents in willingness to say they
| "know" a word that sounds vaguely familiar... and if the
| sound of a word also affects people's willingness to take
| a leap. The study doesn't seem to have included fake
| words or anything like that to catch guessers out (and I
| don't think that was relevant to what they were trying to
| determine, anyway).
|
| I wouldn't be surprised to learn that male respondents
| are more likely to take a leap for "piezoelectricity" or
| "thermistor" than they would be for "peplum" and
| "chignon".
| nuccy wrote:
| Oh wow, you are right! I came to comment on exactly my
| surprise on seeing "parsec" as one of the "best-known"
| (whatever it means in this study) words.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _...rejecting guys from science classes._ "
|
| Do you have a source for this?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Weird choice of vocabulary to study
|
| I think you're confused. These are not words they chose to
| study - these are the words with the largest difference in
| recognition, from a larger corpus of words.
|
| You're projecting some kind of pre-bias onto the researchers
| that I don't think is there.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Perhaps you're right. I read their methodology and it seems
| fair. They did solicit demographic info from the
| participants, but didn't mention if before or after word
| testing. There's still wiggle room there for bias, but
| probably not.
| seanicus wrote:
| Plenty of female otaku/anime fans out there but anecdotally I'd
| say that it's still primarily male. Nowhere near as male as it
| was in the 90's/00's, though.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| Amusingly I only knew "freesia" because its the title of a
| manga.
| not2b wrote:
| My daughter is a huge anime fan but yes, still primarily
| male.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| My daughter is a huge anime fan, but she's not watching the
| anime where the yakuza defend their bushido with katanas.
| burnished wrote:
| oh is she watching the one where the katanas defend the
| yakuza from bushido? its really good
| dnautics wrote:
| I take it she's also not watching the ones where the
| space robots jump into the air at azimuth 90, disengage
| their ailerons to get out of the atmosphere, then travel
| several parsecs in an femtosecond with their boson drive?
| fudged71 wrote:
| Is it possible to see a larger list?
| spiznnx wrote:
| Check out ESM 2 from the study, which includes all 60k words.
| The Male vs Female prevalence is the third sheet in the xlsx.
|
| https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.3758%2Fs134...
| fudged71 wrote:
| Top 50 female:
|
| peplum tulle chiffon chignon bandeau garland freesia chenille
| kohl tarragon taupe cohosh bodice taffeta primrose trimester
| verbena doula murderess ruche tresses amorous boucle peony
| damask antagonistic sarong stridor zoological beau espadrille
| mimosa skittles guacamole pessary shirtdress underwire caddy
| chambray colicky grosgrain jacquard progesterone wallflower
| bangle bin clairvoyance fibroid menopausal whipstitch
|
| Top 50 male:
|
| catacomb strafe parsec depressurize shemale bushido bailout
| hafnium numeral contextualize teraflop neodymium femtosecond
| tomahawk piezoelectricity paladin kevlar yakuza neurotoxic
| moonlit crosshair afterburner gigabit trailblazer
| randomization katana howitzer thermistor enabler codec
| claymore airstrike derby banshee submersible mach flaccidness
| checksum boson aileron unplayable preciously encyclopedic
| siege gauss gaijin degauss unranked servo reverb
| hirundo wrote:
| Diverse results on a word comprehension test probably correlates
| with cultural diversity better than ethnicity does. It could be
| easier and more reliable to assemble a culturally diverse
| workforce via word comprehension clusters than by personal
| history. It's not hard to see how diversity measured like this
| can contribute to a team. It would tend to add people who have
| interests orthogonal to each other, broadening their joint
| perspective.
| janandonly wrote:
| All the words on the female side seem to be fake words (except
| for two) ?
| jfk13 wrote:
| I take it you're a roughly-average male?
| puffoflogic wrote:
| Fascinating; as a man, I can roughly define every single better-
| known-by-men word in the chart ("bushido" gave me the most
| trouble); whereas of the better-known-by-women words, I recognize
| only three and can define them very poorly (without checking my
| answers to a dictionary: I believe that "kohl" is some kind of
| mineral cosmetic [historical?]; "verbena" is an herb; and I'm
| most sure of "sateen" being a kind of cotton cloth which can be
| used in bedding).
| glonq wrote:
| Kohl is that store where you can buy last season's clothes for
| like 80% off ;)
| pmarreck wrote:
| The fact that "shemale" is the most well-known male word really
| speaks to the sexual insecurity of males
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| How's that? Sure it's a slur and not as proper as "woman with a
| penis", but the fact that men are looking at porn of trans
| women, hey at least they think we're hot, right?
| pmarreck wrote:
| Heh, yeah, I don't like the slur aspect, but regular straight
| dudes (especially if they have even a slight inclination
| towards nonstraight) seem tremendously preoccupied with their
| masculinity or lack thereof. I thought it was a sign of that
| and not necessarily interest, but interest is fine!
| vbtemp wrote:
| Fascinating. I could explain, in detail, every single much-
| better-known-by-men word. I did not recognize a single better-
| known-by-female word, with the exception of doula.
| jdprgm wrote:
| This was interesting but just wanted to note they defined "known"
| based off of a test where you are asked yes/no on a series of
| words based on if they are an actual English word or made up. Not
| remotely if you can accurately define/use them and they didn't go
| into details on how often people were voting "yes" on words that
| turned out to not even exist. I would be absolutely shocked in a
| random sample of American men if even 20% could accurately define
| "aileron" or "azimuth".
| kelnos wrote:
| Checks out, at least anecdotally. I recognized (and could define)
| every one of the "male" words, but I recognized only 6 of the
| "female" words, and could probably only define one or two of
| them.
| mcguire wrote:
| _Note:_ "known" means recognized versus non-words.
| lkbm wrote:
| Ah, that's a good catch. I'd have trouble providing a precise
| definition for a lot of these, but I know them. ("servo" is
| some type of engine; "degauss" is a button I pressed on CRTs to
| make them go "boing"; a "doula" helps with birthing _somehow_
| in a non-medical capacity.)
| Kye wrote:
| A servo is the movey bits that move the movey bits on the
| killbots.
| bccdee wrote:
| oh _that 's_ interesting -- I assumed the bar was being able to
| loosely define the words.
| BlameKaneda wrote:
| It's interesting to me that the Japanese words in the table,
| "bushido", "katana", and "yakuza" are more known to (this dataset
| of) men than women. The fashion-related words (taffeta, chignon,
| espadrille, etc) being known more to women makes sense to me, but
| I'm not sure why the three Japanese words are more known to men.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I'd be curious to see the skew among native Japanese speakers -
| I'm assuming the test in the link was run on Americans.
| djur wrote:
| English speakers. If you look at the original study they have
| a similar breakdown for US vs. UK, which is almost more
| interesting.
| djur wrote:
| I'm skeptical about the result for katana, though. Women are
| almost as likely to know "boson" as "katana"?
| rsynnott wrote:
| The word 'boson' was in the news quite a lot for the last
| decade or so, due to CERN. The word 'katana', not so much.
| brimble wrote:
| I doubt that _particular_ word (katana) would be quite so
| permanently stuck in my head if not for watching Teenage
| Mutant Ninja Turtles a lot as a kid. That was a show that was
| for-sure aimed at boys.
|
| The other places I could imagine having encountered it enough
| for it to have stuck are action video games and Japanese or
| Japanese-influenced action cinema & anime. I have some very
| confident guesses at how male and female interest rates in
| those would break down.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| brimble wrote:
| Sure, any particular person may buck their cohort trend,
| but that doesn't mean the trend's not there. Just as I'm
| sure there are some guys really into sewing or fashion
| who'd look at the original list and think, of the mostly-
| women part, "of course I know these, who doesn't?"
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Personal bias ftw.
| rozab wrote:
| An intersection of military history, video games, and weeb-dom.
| 'Yakuza' is notably a popular and long-running video game
| series
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I would think, given your username, that you would have a
| feeling that these male words are more 'badass'?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure the gender ratio of "people who have
| seen Akira" is probably 10:1 male:female
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| come on, I made sure every girlfriend I ever had learned
| all about it shortly before breaking up with me!
| onion2k wrote:
| _It 's interesting to me that the Japanese words in the table,
| "bushido", "katana", and "yakuza" are more known to (this
| dataset of) men than women._
|
| Those three words in particular feature heavily in lots of
| video games and films. That could explain some of it.
| tzs wrote:
| The Yakuza were in a season 8 episode of The Simpsons in
| 1997. That would help make it a perfectly cromulent word for
| a lot of people.
| vmception wrote:
| japanese cultural appreciation is heavily indexed on nerd
| culture and that's heavily men. just an additional audience to
| skew the metrics.
| bitwize wrote:
| The biggest weebs I knew in college were _women_. Sailor Moon
| is woefully underestimated in terms of how much it
| contributed to redressing the nerd gender balance. I won 't
| say that it's completely redressed, but female anime fans and
| japanophiles are considerably more prevalent now than in
| decades past.
|
| Now, the bits of culture that concern swords and warrior
| codes of honor? Yeah, those are boy things, mainly.
| vmception wrote:
| yeah that reminds me its something I've noticed too.
|
| although I encountered something similar, in my schools
| they were a very distinct subculture defined by their
| affinity to Japanese culture, whereas what I see now
| amongst younger people is that many more attractive popular
| well adjusted women (people in general) are ok with or into
| anime, that style, and non-US cinema at all. I like this
| outcome.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Weird Al should have a yakuza-themed album with about half
| nerdcore and half alternately shouting and squealing in
| Japanese.
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| Sounds like the rappers from _Snow Crash_.
|
| For the closest real-world analogue, check out m-flo.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Cool.
|
| I was just thinking there ought to be an AI chat agent
| that can recommend music based on themes and mood,
| perhaps with a periodic, paradoxically-opposite sense of
| humor.
| valarauko wrote:
| My guess is that their martial link is why more men know of
| them, rather than the fact that the words are Japanese. I would
| suspect that the same would hold true for martial words of non-
| Japanese origin as well.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Like "Howitzer" (~85/~55).
| burnished wrote:
| A code of honor, a sword, and a mob. These are stereotypically
| masculine topics, and also words that appear in video games and
| movies, sometimes as the title itself.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Dudes are all secretly gangsta OGs working up the food chain to
| be a baws someday.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Oh, the _fast food_ chain, you mean.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| If those jobs haven't been automated yet. Brought to you by
| Carl's Jr.
|
| https://shiftwa.org/fast-food-chains-announce-automation-
| pla...
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I call Bull... Non replicability on this one. Maybe half the guys
| have heard or seen femtosecond, but I don't believe if you polled
| a random sampling of men that they would know off the top of
| their head what its actual duration is.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| Agreed. Same with checksum.
| throwaway48375 wrote:
| >For each vocabulary test, a random sample of 67 words and 33
| nonwords was selected. For each letter string, participants had
| to indicate whether or not they knew the stimulus.
|
| Nowhere in the study were they asked to define it.
| hanoz wrote:
| Strange. All the male words are perfectly commonplace, and all
| the female ones appear to be completely made up.
| wnoise wrote:
| Tell me you're male without telling me you're male.
| [deleted]
| avinash wrote:
| Same for me. What a coincidence!
| Aspos wrote:
| Let me guess...
|
| Such dataset could be used as a gender captcha.
| netsharc wrote:
| There's a comic strip I saw once about how to detect people
| pretending to be girls on online chats. Ask them "what do you
| think of [I can't remember the word]?" and if they go "Huh?"
| you know they're pretending to be a girl. The word was a word
| that meant decoration on windows, but I can't remember what
| it is...
| function_seven wrote:
| This is brilliant. Like that time the psychiatrist showed me
| endless silhouettes of my parents fighting, and kept asking me,
| "What do you see here?"
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I had the same experience. Googling them, I see the following
| categories:
|
| - (Women's) clothing and cosmetics (peplum, bandeau, kohl,
| espadrille, whipstitch)
|
| - Hair style (chignon)
|
| - Fabrics and weaving (ruche, boucle, chenille, voile, sateen,
| jacquard, damask, chambray)
|
| - Women's health (pessary, doula)
|
| - Flowers (Freesia, Verbena)
|
| Interestingly, half of these words aren't even in Firefox's
| dictionary it seems. Even with "English (United States, large)"
| some words are underlined with red squiggles.
|
| Most excessively male-recognised words seem to come from
| technical fields or science, or Japanese culture, weirdly
| enough. The only explanation I can give for most men seemingly
| knowing "shemale" is porn.
|
| My conclusion for this data: men tend to know fewer words
| relating to clothes and aesthetics, women tend to know fewer
| words relating to science and Japanese culture. As the
| recognition for "female" words is much lower than that of the
| "male" words, I'd say that this is because of a lack of men
| with knowledge about clothes.
| ndm000 wrote:
| At first I thought "all the female words must be in some other
| language".
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| It does seem like the female words are more obviously foreign
| (specifically French) whereas the male words tend towards
| being more technical.
| [deleted]
| djur wrote:
| I'm seeing Greek, Latin, Japanese, German, and Danish just
| skimming the "male words", and plenty of the "female words"
| have been used in English for ages. I think that's more a
| familiarity effect.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Of course the roots of English include Greek and Latin
| and German, but words like femtosecond or
| piezoelectricity or teraflop or milliamp are technical
| terms, not old but standard words imported from another
| language. Maybe "femtosecond" was used by Danish
| scientists in the 1800's or something, but it's
| definitely not a word that was _common_ in another
| language and then imported into English.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Maybe "femtosecond" was used by Danish scientists in the
| 1800's or something, but it's definitely not a word that
| was common in another language and then imported into
| English.
|
| Worth noting that by the percentages here fewer than 50%
| of males surveyed were familiar with it.
| djur wrote:
| "Chambray", "chignon", "bandeau" etc. are also standard
| technical words imported from another language.
| rjvs wrote:
| The female words are technical too, just in a different
| field to the one you are in.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| That's fair. I guess I meant "technical" in the sense of
| being associated with math/science/engineering.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Thanks, that cheered me up this morning! :)
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| jvanderbot wrote:
| So, let me clarify.
|
| You claim your vocab is sufficiently large that you should have
| known all the words, and as you suggest, exhibit a strong bias
| towards male-known words illuminated by the study, and
| therefore suspect the entire dataset is fraudulent because you
| didn't recognize the female-familiar words?
|
| Is this satire? "Study showing males don't know certain things
| deemed completely fraudulent by person on internet technology
| forum. 'I would have known those things if they were real',
| claims person of unknown gender known as 'errcorrectcode' on
| forum 'hacker news'."
| jerf wrote:
| Honesty compels me to admit that I also expected not to be
| surprised by the female side of the graph, and was quite
| wrong (I got 4ish).
|
| In hindsight, I realize the error I made is that even if I
| have an above average vocabulary, there is still going to be
| the _extreme outliers_ of gender-connected words that I
| shouldn 't expect my vocabulary to overcome. It may well be
| the case (and I'm serious here) that there's only another
| dozen or two words "female words" that I wouldn't recognize.
| I certainly doubt it runs for another few hundred words. But
| it shouldn't be surprising that there the extreme outliers
| are things I have entirely missed.
|
| For instance, I knew what a doula is... but only by the skin
| of my teeth, so to speak, by overhearing my wife discussing
| it with other women at a very specific time in our lives that
| has only happened a limited number of times. If it had so
| happened I'd whiffed those windows of perhaps a few minutes
| total in my entire life, I'd still not know.
|
| Femtosecond, by contrast, heck I've seen that hundreds of
| times easily. My wife has the requisite science training to
| know what that is, even if I'm not sure if she's ever used
| it. As it so happens just a couple of months ago I used
| "thermistor" in front of her and had to explain the word. She
| understood the concept just fine (again, had the requisite
| science training) but was not familiar with the word. Perhaps
| a bit ironically, it was in the context of describing how to
| fix kitchen temperature probes that were misreading.
|
| (Since that may make someone curious, they can misread if
| water makes it down to the thermistor part. You can fix it by
| leaving it in a 200 degree oven for a while. Protip: The
| probe end goes in the oven, the plastic end stays outside. A,
| err, "friend" of mine can attest to the fact that if you cock
| that up through sheer idiocy, it may still work afterwards,
| but the plastic end certainly gets an exciting new modern art
| look.)
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| kzrdude wrote:
| I was curious and used a dictionary on words I didn't know. You
| can try the words there!
| advisedwang wrote:
| Sateen is not "phony/archaic/marketing". Its a totally
| legitimate word. Same with the other female-known words.
|
| I'm guessing you're male? Consider maybe your assessment is
| just part of the same gender-difference that results in this
| trend and not some objective underlying fact.
|
| (I don't want to get dragged into specific words, but certainly
| "bushido" is more archaic - it refers to a completely obsolete
| concept - and probably also phony - I've heard, but done no
| research on, that bushido only really exists as a rosy
| nostalgic view of a philosophy that was not really meaningful
| in the period it refers to).
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| notahacker wrote:
| Doula is apparently a well established profession (I just
| learned that too!). A pessary is a medical device.
|
| "Shemale" is a colloquial, somewhat demeaning term used
| mostly in porn.
|
| I think it takes a rather special type of reasoning to
| assume that your knowledge of only the latter term is
| because the former words just aren't as important or
| useful...
| thelopa wrote:
| "Somewhat demeaning"? Shemale is a slur.
| [deleted]
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Sorry, I don't want to misunderstand you: you're saying that
| the words better known by women are all phony, archaic, or
| marketing buzzwords; and the words identified by men are,
| contrariwise, all "real"? And they are phony or archaic because
| you, the smart one with a 75k vocabulary, don't personally know
| them? I can't believe someone could be so out of touch.
|
| Just as one counter example, "bushido" is totally archaic, has
| been irrelevant for 150 years since the Meiji restoration.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| "Bushido" isn't archaic because it's used as a cultural-
| philosophical McGuffin theme in mainstream, modern
| ('00-present) movies.
|
| "Carl" and "fie" are archaic.
|
| I miswrote. Allow me to nail myself to the cross next to
| Whoopi. :)
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Next: correlate with college admission test vocabulary, see how
| biased they are.
| karaterobot wrote:
| They made the word prevalence table available, but I can't load
| it into my spreadsheet program.
|
| The question I'm trying to answer is, are the words in Table 2
| the words that differed the most by gender, or were they selected
| as representative examples?
|
| In other words, if the title of that table is just "Words known
| better by males than by females..." should I interpret that as
| meaning "[some examples of] words known better by males than
| females and vice versa", or "words known [best] by males and
| females, and vice versa"?
| culi wrote:
| I guess that's an interesting way to point out that the domain
| most dominated by women over men is fashion and the domain most
| dominated by men over women is engineering (or porn in the case
| of "shemale"?)
| chaosbutters314 wrote:
| kind of weird and offensive to put a transgender slur on here.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| I'll add 2 things here in the spirit of the discussion.
|
| One, I dabble in amateur fiction writing as a hobby. And I'm a
| man, but a big percentage of my readers are female. One thing
| I've been hit on the head with repeatedly, when getting feedback
| from female readers, is how often how sensitive they can be about
| the exact choice of words or phrasing I use. My 1st draft will be
| a certain way. After getting feedback from female readers, I
| often have to revise the text to tweak the words and phrases in
| it, to make it less distasteful or alienating for them. Note...
| this is NOT me "perceiving" it to be this way -- instead it is
| based on what happens factually. Over the years since 1st getting
| bitten by this (decades now) I've learned enough about the gender
| differences in reading perception that it doesn't bother me as
| much anymore, and I can more often make my 1st draft such that it
| lacks these kinds of "gender perception difference bombs".
|
| Basically, as a fiction writer, you must be VERY aware of gender
| differences, at scale, in order to produce the most popular final
| draft. Any experienced writer will tell you this.
|
| Two... I got into the Wordle playing thing, and in recent weeks
| there was a solution word which caused a minor kerfluffle among
| fans. I was on Twitter one day and stumbled into threads where
| lots of women were complaining about that day's solution word.
| Some said it was soooo bad, that when a female player would only
| _hear_ indirectly about how icky the word was on Twitter --
| without literally seeing the answer -- they could often _guess_
| what it was, in 1 attempt. just 1 attempt! And they would post
| screenshots and result shareouts to prove they could solve it in
| 1 attempt.
|
| The word was "moist".
|
| MOIST!
|
| I remember it when it happened because for me, for whatever
| reason, it had taken like 5 tries to solve it, with no outside
| social media hints. Yet lots of women were nailing in 1 or 2
| tries.
|
| So... _never_ tell me that males and females are identical or
| somehow "equal" when it comes to "neural language wiring" or at
| least not in their reading perception biases.
|
| We are different. In broadstrokes. At scale. Reliably.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Interesting. If someone were describing a word as "icky" in
| Internet subcultures, I'd guess "moist", not because it's
| actually icky, but because it's Internet subculture.
|
| It's sort of how if someone on the Internet said "He's got a
| fedora", I would conclude that they're saying "This guy is a
| dork". In the real world, it would likely be a statement of
| fact, and based on the girls I hang out with, a statement of
| fashion.
|
| Without evidence to back it, I'd hypothesize that this is a
| subculture effect, more than a gender effect.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I once lost first-place in a spelling bee with a word I'd never
| seen before (as a guy): "Leotard"
|
| I spelled it exactly as it sounded: "Leatard" /eyeroll
| rdiddly wrote:
| Look no further than this for evidence of men's famous
| underrepresentation in the textile arts.
| [deleted]
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I once used this phenomenon to build a tool to reliably determine
| whether a male or female had written a given text. I was
| surprised how accurate it was even when trained on a relatively
| small corpus. Used CRM114.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRM114_(program)
| [deleted]
| orangepurple wrote:
| There is no way 48% of males know what a thermistor is. This
| whole statistic is biased to the point of uselessness. Cute,
| though.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Makes me wonder who did they ask.
| scythmic_waves wrote:
| From the paper, participants didn't need to define the word.
| They just had to recognize that it was a real word [1]:
|
| > Participants and the vocabulary test used
|
| >
|
| > For each vocabulary test, a random sample of 67 words and 33
| nonwords was selected. For each letter string, participants had
| to indicate whether or not they knew the stimulus. At the end
| of the test, participants received information about their
| performance, in the form of a vocabulary score based on the
| percentage of correctly identified words minus the percentage
| of nonwords identified as words. For instance, a participant
| who responded "yes" to 55 of the 67 words and to 2 of the 33
| nonwords received feedback that they knew 55/67 - 2/33 = 76% of
| the English vocabulary.
|
| Granted, there's nothing stopping a participant from responding
| "Yes" to a word they can't define. But I think that's more
| likely to happen on words that the participant knows of even if
| they can't define it.
|
| Here's the test, BTW [2]. It appears to still be up.
|
| [1]
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9#...
|
| [2] http://vocabulary.ugent.be/
| nathell wrote:
| vorpalhex wrote:
| NB is <0.1% of the US population. [1] So it skews the results
| basically not at all.
|
| [1] - https://weareher.com/what-percentage-of-the-us-
| population-is...
| voldacar wrote:
| Even if you completely ignore the meaning and usage context of
| these words, there are some significant differences.
|
| The male words are sharper, rougher, more incisive. Azimuth,
| teraflop, neodymium, yakuza. The female words are rounder,
| smoother, less threatening. Verbena, doula, sateen, chenille.
|
| This is extremely interesting and not subtle at all
| kelnos wrote:
| A lot of the "female" words are fashion/style related. For a
| long time, France (and Italy) dominated the fashion world, so a
| lot of technical terms around fashion are French, which
| probably explains the distinction.
| yongjik wrote:
| Hmm I'm not so sure about that. To a textile worker, the
| difference between sateen and corduroy would be as sharp and
| incisive as the difference between azimuth and altitude is to
| an astronomer.
| mLuby wrote:
| Are you referring to how the words "feel" in your mind ([?]
| average of a cluster of associated words) or about the sounds
| in the words?
|
| Plosives (PaT), sibilants (Sassy/SHow) or glottals (CoCKpit)
| sound "sharper" to me than their voiced equivalents (BaD,
| Zoo/menaGerie, GooGle). Fricatives (FaVorite, baTH/baTHE) or
| nasals (NuMber) or taps (RoLe) tend to sound longer and softer.
| voldacar wrote:
| It's definitely both. It's not just the physical sounds I
| make when pronouncing them, but the mood and the overall
| "atmosphere" of the words that is different.
| throwamon wrote:
| This is an interesting observation, because the next question
| should be whether they _know_ the word exists or they just
| "feel like" it exists (see sibling comment about the Bouba/Kiki
| effect).
| jamespwilliams wrote:
| Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
| smudgy wrote:
| Mind... blown!
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Would be interesting if this could be expended and linked to
| personality types based on their past communications. Marketing
| applications, and possibly diagnostic. Maybe you could predict
| someone falling into depression based on a change in their
| vocabulary for example.
| tqi wrote:
| What does "knowing" a word mean? Is it just recognizing that the
| word is a valid word?
|
| I am skeptical that 80% of men recognize that "boson" is a word,
| but only about 50% of women could put together "shemale" from
| context clues.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Higgs boson was pretty famous.
| Bolkan wrote:
| How was checksum known by >50% of men? When would a non
| programmer come across this word?
| teekert wrote:
| The had me in the first half (not gonna lie) thinking that I just
| don't know any of these words because I'm not a native
| speakers... But then I knew all the words in the second half.
| I'll be showing this to my female techy colleagues, see what they
| get. I know for a fact that they know many of the latter. So I'm
| curious how this distributes over age or wage etc.
|
| Of course, the true meaning of this statistic is in the absolute
| numbers which aren't shown. Ie the number could be representing a
| massive amount of males and show tech bias, the other numbers
| could be representing a very low amount of females in fashion (it
| seems like).
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| Interesting numbers, but it'd be vastly improved by being able to
| filter for age ranges too.
|
| Gauss and Degauss are the two that jumped out at me. I'd be
| curious to know how many people of either gender have encountered
| it, if they're young enough to have never lived with CRT TVs.
| burnished wrote:
| You can also encounter those words in a high school or college
| physics course, which is where I associate them.
| armadsen wrote:
| Same, although I also know degauss as it relates to CRTs.
| "Gaussian blur" -- almost always mispronounced -- is also
| relatively commonly encountered by anyone doing image or
| video editing. Though of course, that's a completely
| different term described by the same person's name.
| wnoise wrote:
| How is it pronounced, and how do you think it should be
| pronounced?
| djur wrote:
| The name is pronounced something like "gouse", and the
| blur is fairly commonly pronounced "goss-ian".
| wnoise wrote:
| Huh. Must vary by community. I've only heard them
| pronounced in concordant ways, and closer to your first.
| [deleted]
| ceras wrote:
| FWIW, the Google Search pronunciation guide[0] says
| Guassian like "gouse-ian", which is the only way I've
| heard it pronounced (US east coast). It's also what I see
| as the phonetically-written pronunciation when checking a
| couple dictionaries[1], and this English blog post[2].
|
| [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=pronounce+gaussian&rl
| z=1C5GC...
|
| [1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gaussian
|
| [2] https://painfulenglish.com/2014/01/26/how-to-
| pronounce-gauss...
| djur wrote:
| I am sure that it's just a case of people having read the
| word and never heard it spoken.
| woopwoop wrote:
| I'm a man, and would have answered no to degauss, although I'm
| 32 (so old enough to have had a crt tv in college). I remember
| the word upon looking it up though. Gauss I would have assumed
| was a trick question (he's a person!), but on further
| reflection I remember that it's a unit for something or another
| in electrostatics.
| posix86 wrote:
| ...Gauss is one of the most important mathematicians who ever
| lived. The gaussian distribution is the single most important
| random distribution there is. The standard 2d coordinate system
| is often also referred to as the gaussian plane. I'm guessing
| more men know him due to this reason: more men are in STEM.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I think I first ran into "degauss" in a documentary talking
| about German magnetic mines in WWII.
| rkapsoro wrote:
| Wow, I know 100% of the male-identified words and none of the
| female ones.
|
| I expected more overlap.
|
| I'm not the only one in comments to say this, but perhaps it is
| interesting to see multiple people reporting this.
| dzink wrote:
| As a female not born in the US, I am familiar with most of the
| male words and only some of the female. I'd say the distribution
| is affected more by US culture than gender.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I think it says more about stereotypical interests rather than
| anything intrinsic about the sexes. The male words are actually
| just nerddom, science and tech(incl military tech), and porn.
| The female words are just fashion and reproductive words. May I
| guess that you're more into science and tech than you are into
| fashion?
| Wiseacre wrote:
| > and porn
|
| Are you talking about Shemale? Pretty sure it's a fashion
| brand.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >Are you talking about Shemale? Pretty sure it's a fashion
| brand.
|
| Thought he was joking at first, but nope! They're a fashion
| brand. Google "Shemale pearl necklace" and you can see
| their stylish jewellery range!
| nverno wrote:
| The data they used was ~3/4 USA, 1/4 UK.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Table presents p = Prob(knows word | male).
|
| The unconditional probability P(male) is around 1/2 or a little
| less.
|
| Then Prob(male | knows word) = Prob(knows word | male) P(male) /
| P(knows word).
|
| ---
|
| Now, we're not given P(knows_word), but assuming answers are from
| a reasonably balanced sample, we know that
|
| P(knows word) = P(male)P(knows word|male) + P(female)P(knows
| word|female) = [P(knows|m]+P(knows|f)]/2
|
| Going back:
|
| Prob(m | knows) = 0.5 _Prob(knows | m) /
| 0.5_[P(knows|m]+P(knows|f)]
|
| Which gives us a formula. E.g. for peplum, Prob(m|knows) is
|
| 13%/(13%+64%) = 13/77 ~= 16.8%
|
| For "shemale":
|
| 88%/(88%+54%) = 88/142 ~= 62.0%
|
| So sometimes the actual "maleness" or "femaleness" of the word is
| overstated, while sometimes its underestimated.
|
| This isn't a critique of an article, it's a literal comment.
|
| --- Edit:
|
| The drive to procrastinate today is strong. Here are the
| probabilities for all words.
|
| https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1-UP3qTJ3GZ3BpsA0ZNa...
| not2b wrote:
| Might be interesting to do a similar experiment by age: people in
| their 20s vs 40s vs 60s, say.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| My late grandfather (would've been 90's) didn't know quite as
| many questions on Jeopardy! as Ken Jennings, but within a std
| deviation.
|
| When I was 20, if throwing out the sports deck, no one wanted
| to play Trivial Pursuit with me. Lol.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Wow I thought this was going to be a subtle effect but I
| literally knew all of the male words and zero of the female ones
| (I'm male). What's even the context of those top words? The male
| ones are tech/games/science but the female? I think I half
| recognize jaquard as a fabric or fashion term.
| k__ wrote:
| My non-binary friend knew roughly half of both sides.
|
| (No joke)
|
| They are AFAB, interested in japanese culture and STEM, but
| also sew rather much.
| unwind wrote:
| In case anyone wondered, here "AFAB" means "assigned female
| at birth" [1] and as far as I can understand simply means
| that the person was determined to be female at some point, by
| visual inspection basically.
|
| [1] https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sexopedia/a38294924/afab-
| amab/
| klipt wrote:
| It's really to do with gender roles though. Nurse sees a
| penis on the baby - writes M on the birth certificate -
| child ends up being told by teachers they're not allowed to
| cry because they're a boy.
|
| Non binary people think those gender roles don't make sense
| for themselves, and in that respect, I think almost
| everyone is at least a little non binary. Maybe not enough
| to feel it's worth declaring, but I've never met anyone who
| really loves _everything_ about their gender role.
| Wiseacre wrote:
| Same for age role, socioeconomic role, or racial role. I
| wonder why we only talk about gender roles.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Elaborate?
| xenocratus wrote:
| We grow up with very specific ideas about what people
| do/say/wear/etc. when they're a certain age, or in a
| certain socio-economic group, or when you belong to a
| certain race/cultural background/... However, much like
| with introvertedness/extrovertedness, few people have an
| overwhelming amount of characteristics from their
| "assumed" group and very few/none from the other "groups"
| - we're mostly just a patchwork of characteristics from
| all directions, usually skewing towards one particular
| side.
| Wiseacre wrote:
| Gender roles certainly exist. Why wouldn't age roles,
| socioeconomic roles, or racial roles exist as well?
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Same with my spouse, non-binary, regular anime watcher /
| video game player, so "katana" they knew, but not "strafe".
| (I should get them into TF2...)
| armadsen wrote:
| Jacquard is actually an interesting one to me, because it
| overlaps the two major subject areas (fashion/textiles and
| science/tech). It's also one I (male) knew, while I didn't know
| most of the "more female" words.
|
| The Jacquard loom was programmable with punch cards, and is a
| very important early predecessor of computers (especially
| Babbage's analytical engine). IIRC, there's one (or a replica)
| in the Computer History Museum.
|
| Jacquard also refers to the kind of fabric the loom could
| produce.
| Fatnino wrote:
| The computer history museum had a full sized Babbage
| difference engine, not an analytical engine. It was on loan
| and the owner took it back to put in his living room or
| something.
| Lammy wrote:
| I learned that one from Boards of Canada
|
| https://bocpages.org/wiki/Jacquard_Causeway
|
| https://vimeo.com/69572175
| pram wrote:
| Learned about that in James Burkes Connections! Amazing
| series if you haven't seen it.
| lizknope wrote:
| Everything by James Burke is amazing. He's written a lot of
| other books in the Connections style
| SilasX wrote:
| Yeah, I (male) recognized jacquard, but only in the context
| of the Jacquard loom and superficial awareness that they're
| programmable textile making machines.
| sjburt wrote:
| My guess is that most men would know it as a loom and most
| women would know it as a type of fabric. I wonder if
| jacquard fabric is still produced on anything resembling a
| jacquard loom.
| fudged71 wrote:
| I knew Jacquard because of Google's textiles/tech project
| https://atap.google.com/jacquard/
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| I thought I recognized Jacquard as in the similarity measure,
| but it turns out that one is actually spelled Jaccard.
| Thereby arguably furthering the initial point.
| watmough wrote:
| Yves Delorme make some lovely Jacquard bath sheets.
|
| If you don't blanche at spending $100+ on a single towel. ;)
| rayiner wrote:
| I'm a man--I knew all the male words and could define them. I
| knew seven of the female words and could only define one
| without guessing. Wow.
| LinAGKar wrote:
| Same here. Even for the few male words I didn't know exactly
| what they meant, I had a vague ideas about them, while the
| female ones are complete gibberish to me.
| wincy wrote:
| I only know because we attempted a home birth and my wife
| trained to become one, but a doula is an assistant to a
| midwife. It would make sense most men would have no idea what
| this is but a lot of women have probably watched YouTube videos
| thinking about how they want to give birth, so doula would be a
| well defined word for them.
| hammock wrote:
| No one cares but I went 12/20 on the female words. Most of the
| ones I knew are fashion-related or flowers. The ones I didn't
| know (and looked up) are female reproduction-related.
| allendoerfer wrote:
| I think males and females reproduce the same way.
| coutego wrote:
| Not really... Not when they are the subject of the sentence
| instead of the direct object.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't think they do. The second step for a man to
| reproduce, after going through a male puberty, is to find a
| woman. The process is different for women, and may never
| even directly involve a man.
| [deleted]
| munk-a wrote:
| Males would struggle to make proper use of a pessary.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Men don't generally have a doula guiding them through
| giving birth.
| User23 wrote:
| Is this really the state of sex ed?
| rat9988 wrote:
| Which has nothing to do with his point.
| glonq wrote:
| Yeah, this was way more accurate for me than I expected.
|
| I figured that I'd be old/wise/literate enough to know many of
| the "female" words. _Nope_
| Kalium wrote:
| They're mostly about style in some manner. A chignon is a
| hairstyle, a bandeau is a garment, kohl is a type of facial
| makeup (with its own fascinating history). Jaquard, chambray,
| chenille, sateen, and damask are all words that apply to
| fabrics in some fashion. An espadrille is a particular style of
| shoe.
|
| Verbena is a plant. A pessary is a medical device. A doula is a
| supportive person through a medical experience, often
| childbirth in an American context.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I think most dads would know what a doula is
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Not in the US, I bet. The only reason I know is that I had
| a male co-worker whose wife was one.
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> I think most dads would know what a doula is
|
| > Not in the US, I bet. The only reason I know is that I
| had a male co-worker whose wife was one.
|
| Yeah, I also feel the term and role could be very
| subculture-specific, and mainly limited to urban, very-
| liberal women interested in "wellness."
|
| I've seen the term given brief treatment in some new
| parent books, but I would not have registered it if I
| hadn't already had some familiarity.
| Kozmik1 wrote:
| US Dad of 2. We had a doula for our first child, she was
| hugely helpful, even in a hospital birth. Highly
| recommend!
| brimble wrote:
| Doulas are yuppie stuff in the US, mostly. Also connected
| with home births to a large degree, rates of interest in
| which I'd _expect_ are also connected with income, to a
| point. I 'd definitely bet most US fathers wouldn't be
| able to tell you what it means, though it's possible that
| a majority of fathers _on this site_ know the term (I did
| --but then, of course I do).
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I'd be interested to see how knowledge of a lot of these
| words breaks down by income. (I too know what a doula is;
| I'm not sure if I knew this before my partner was
| pregnant. We did not use a doula, but we're of the class
| of people who at least think about it.)
| brimble wrote:
| Oh man, this exact thing but for income brackets would be
| _fascinating_.
| pmarreck wrote:
| New father of a 7 month old here (at the tender age of 49
| no less).
|
| We used a doula, but only as a support person (I believe
| in medical advances, hah) and she was fantastic for that
| role.
| tzs wrote:
| There was a doula on a 2004 episode of "Frasier" [1]
| which is probably where I learned the word.
|
| [1] http://www.kacl780.net/frasier/transcripts/season_11/
| episode...
| tarsinge wrote:
| It's funny because a lot of these are near everyday use
| French words:
|
| - boucle: loop
|
| - ruche: beehive
|
| - chignon: hair bun?
|
| - chenille: caterpillar
|
| - bandeau: headband
|
| - voile: veil
|
| ...
| dmix wrote:
| France has most (or a significant percentage) of the
| leading fashion houses and cosmetic brands. So it makes
| sense.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > France has most (or a significant percentage) of the
| leading fashion houses and cosmetic brands. So it makes
| sense.
|
| Also, I think French words (in general) have associations
| of "high class" and "fashionable" in the American
| context, so calling something by a French word is an easy
| way for a marketer to fancy something up (for certain
| classes of something).
| godelski wrote:
| I attempted to learn French at one point and one thing I
| realized is that fancy words in English are frequently
| their direct translation in French. I assume this comes
| from royalty generally speaking both English and French. If
| there's a French user here, do you know if the reverse
| happened too?
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Arguably goes back to the Norman conquest. You muck about
| in the fields with the Germanic _swine_ but eat the
| French-derived _pork_. You raise _cows_ but eat _beef_.
| Likewise _mutton_.
|
| Military words also tend to come from French, which is
| how they got to be eating those fine foods.
| bradwood wrote:
| But remember, the French have no word for entrepreneur :)
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisoncoleman/2014/02/14
| /entrep...
| Karsteski wrote:
| I only ever saw the word Kohl(cabbage) when I played Stardew
| Valley in German. Never seen or heard any of the other
| female-dominant words in my life
| Dagonfly wrote:
| That's a different Kohl. The english word Kohl means a type
| of african/middle eastern make-up (Kajal in german).
| Kalium wrote:
| It might also be a interpreted as a reference to a
| department store chain that mostly sells clothing - Kohl's.
| englishrookie wrote:
| The eye makeup 'kohl' is in no way related to the German
| word for cabbage. Apparently it's an Arabic word
| (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kohl). Funnily enough,
| Kohle (with a schwa at the end) in German means coal (as a
| mass noun) which is of course black, like the eye makeup.
| jacobsievers wrote:
| Verbena is a plant... commonly used as a fragrance for
| lotions and creams.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > Verbena is a plant
|
| Hey, I knew that one! And sateen. But those were the only
| two. I didn't expect the divide to be so stark.
|
| In hindsight, I suppose it's reasonable that terms from the
| largest, most gender-unbalanced niches should have
| considerable predictive power, but I didn't expect it to be
| quite so effective going in.
| cataphract wrote:
| I only knew this one. I have a lemon verbena. It makes
| great infusions. I highly recommend it if you live in a
| warmish climate. They grow very fast.
| flir wrote:
| Freesia is a plant too (my grandmother's favourite). I knew
| most of the fabric ones (ruche, tulle, chenille, etc) but
| that's my wife's hobby. I don't know if that counts as
| trade-specific jargon or not (I guess not if the majority
| of women know them, and not just dressmakers). People in
| our industry should definitely know jacquard, though.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| A pessary is a medical device _inserted into the vagina_ ,
| for further context.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I knew this because of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit
| ed_States_v._One_Package...
| kzrdude wrote:
| I knew that one. Thanks to sex ed.
| Joeboy wrote:
| Monty Python was my introduction[1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ
| madcaptenor wrote:
| The data can be downloaded from https://osf.io/nbu9e/ . I
| tracked it down because I was wondering:
|
| - pessary was known by 53% of females, 19% of males
|
| - suppository was known by 88% of females, 80% of males
| copperx wrote:
| Suppository is one of those words that I would assume
| 99.9% of the population knows because of it being common
| over the counter, and in sitcoms and media. I'm assuming
| they're including children under 12 in the data? That
| would explain the low percentages.
| brimble wrote:
| That checks out. I'd say at least 80% of my encounters
| with the word have been jokes in media, or jokes between
| people (probably inspired by or ripped off from media).
| Most young kids wouldn't know it, though.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| More people are functionally illiterate than you might
| expect if you're in a high IQ bubble like the tech
| industry. In 2017, 19% of American adults scored level 1
| or below on the PIAAC literacy test:
| https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=69
|
| Here's a sample reading test: https://www.oecd.org/skills
| /piaac/Literacy%20Sample%20Items.... It's a drawing of an
| ear, and the options are "ear", "egg", "lip" and "jar".
| You have to pick the correct word.
| mgh2 wrote:
| What is the population (responders) sample size?
| Percentages don't mean much without this.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| About 400 for each word. So any individual word doesn't
| mean much, I agree - I think they're more interested in
| the general trends.
| dmoy wrote:
| 388
| belorn wrote:
| I am a bit surprised that sateen is on that list since it is
| one of the most/more common fabric used for bedding.
|
| Damask is a bit more funny word in that video games tend to
| commonly use it for items, given that it was popular during
| the middle ages. Never seen it in clothing stores.
|
| There isn't a wikipedia article about jacquard as a fabric,
| which is a bit odd. There is one about the Jacquard machine?
|
| Chambray was an popular fabric in the 19th century, but I
| don't remember seeing it in clothes stores.
|
| Chenille seems to be a fabric used in yarns.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Sateen probably is a quite relevant example - I, as a male,
| have absolutely no idea what fabric is used for the bedding
| I sleep in or buy, it might as well be sateen but even when
| looking for bedding I would not care to read the part of
| the description where it could say 'sateen'; perhaps I
| might touch it while browsing in a store and use the sense
| as a criteria for choosing between, but it's not relevant
| enough to read and use the fabric name at the time, much
| less remember it. I know that there exist fancy beddings
| made of silk, but that's literally as far as my interest in
| bedding fabric has ever gone.
| [deleted]
| rsynnott wrote:
| A sort of early nearly-robot; it's where punched cards were
| first used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine
| liquidify wrote:
| same
| mc32 wrote:
| I think this is thoroughly expected.
|
| Imagine you have a set of legal words (legalese) and then you
| have a set of scientific words or statistical words (all cants)
| and you show the sets to those not associated with those
| sets... we'd see similar results.
|
| It's neat to find these oddities but that's all it is,
| linguistically.
| lhorie wrote:
| It largely follows gender stereotypical interest lines. In this
| one, my wife describes the list as "fashion related stuff".
| Here's another older list from a different study[0]
|
| Higher recognition rates by males:
|
| - codec (88, 48)
|
| - solenoid (87, 54)
|
| - golem (89, 56)
|
| - mach (93, 63)
|
| - humvee (88, 58)
|
| - claymore (87, 589
|
| - scimitar (86, 58)
|
| - kevlar (93, 65)
|
| - paladin (93, 66)
|
| - bolshevism (85, 60)
|
| - biped (86, 61)
|
| - dreadnought (90, 66)
|
| Higher recognition rates by females:
|
| - taffeta (48, 87)
|
| - tresses (61, 93)
|
| - bottlebrush (58, 89)
|
| - flouncy (55, 86)
|
| - mascarpone (60, 90)
|
| - decoupage (56, 86)
|
| - progesterone (63, 92)
|
| - wisteria (61, 89)
|
| - taupe (66, 93)
|
| - flouncing (67, 94)
|
| - peony (70, 96)
|
| - bodice (71, 96)
|
| [0] https://www.insider.com/gender-and-vocabulary-
| analysis-2014-...
| kelnos wrote:
| Interesting. I (male) recognize all but one of the "female"
| words in this list (and can define most of them), but
| recognized only 6 from the list in the article, and could
| define only one or two. I wonder why the article's list is so
| much "harder".
|
| (I recognized and could define all of the "male" words in
| both lists, so I do seem to conform to this stereotype...)
| pedrosorio wrote:
| The recognition rates in the comment you're replying to are
| much higher than the ones in the article.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| I remember from another study that "cybernetic" and "taupe"
| were highly polarized. which direction is an exercise left
| for the reader :)
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > What's even the context of those top words?
|
| Without trying to google any of them, I think they're colors -
| I think chambray is a color, but I don't know what color it is.
| ntlk wrote:
| It's a type of fabric, not colour.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| > The male ones are tech/games/science
|
| Science, war and... the last one.
| vdnkh wrote:
| Seems a bunch are around fabric/garments, I have a minor sewing
| hobby so I recognized some of them (male)
| wruza wrote:
| I recognized it because I once destroyed a couch fabric in a
| rented apartment and had to choose a replacement. It's as bad
| as choosing js framework, but you're not a tech guy on top of
| that.
| brimble wrote:
| Yeah, it's very nearly all fabric or textile-related from
| what I can tell. Bet you could make the same list by picking
| any two sex-skewed hobbies and charting words that see little
| use outside those interests.
| meetups323 wrote:
| You probably already know this, but that makes you a
| seamster. I both sew and practice a particular LISP dialect,
| making me a seamster schemester (in the words of GJS).
| pmarreck wrote:
| That's awesome!
| WesternWind wrote:
| A bunch but not all, Picking out a few I recognized (though I
| had to double check freesia).
|
| A doula is basically a birthing coach often used for at home
| pregnancies, a pessary is a vaginal medical device, kohl is
| eye makeup, verbena is an herb, freesia is a flower, chigon
| is a type of hair bun.
| mypastself wrote:
| Same here, but I'm also surprised only around 30% of women know
| the word "yakuza". Although I'm sure those same women would be
| shocked by my not knowing what a chignon is.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| I was shocked at how low on the list "katana" was. It's so
| prevalent in pop culture, from Kill Bill to The Teenage
| Mutant Ninja Turtles.
| Delk wrote:
| I don't know if this would affect the observed/reported
| differences between sexes, but there are also different
| levels of knowing.
|
| I would have known that neodymium is some kind of a
| substance, but I wouldn't have known or remembered that it
| was an element without checking. I'd probably answer I knew
| the word "degauss" but if I had to explain what it
| physically is, I'd struggle. I might not remember what
| distinguishes howitzers from other artillery pieces. Out of
| these, I'd probably report not knowing neodymium, knowing
| howitzer, and be a bit torn on degaussing.
|
| Someone might know that a katana is a weapon, or "some kind
| of a ninja thing", or maybe even a sword, but might not
| feel comfortable enough about the details to report knowing
| it. Also, it might be more well-known among younger people
| who know the pop culture than people who don't.
|
| But then, I guess it might also be that people just have
| rather different areas of familiarity, as the article
| indicates, and a significant part of the English speaking
| population might be as clueless about katanas as I am about
| tulles, or whatever the plural for that is. I only knew one
| or two of the words from the upper half. I'm not a native
| English speaker, though, which perhaps not only limits my
| vocabulary compared to native speakers but might also tilt
| things even further towards the science/tech words.
| prionassembly wrote:
| "Unusually strong neodymium magnets" were a popular
| young-adult toy in the late 2000s to early 2010s. I had
| them both in flat discs and little balls.
|
| Now that I have a baby crawling around I pray that I
| haven't misplaced any in some crevice of the house...
| kqr wrote:
| They were also a part of rotating rust drives, which made
| it very fun to find old ones and pick them apart.
| Kye wrote:
| Leonardo uses ninjatos as of the last time I paid attention
| to the franchise. Katanas are much longer.
| brimble wrote:
| Whatever they look like, they're usually _described_ by
| TMNT media as katanas. Quite possibly incorrectly, for
| all I know.
| brimble wrote:
| I bet if you charted hours spent with media in which the
| word "katana" occurs, you'd see a male/female ratio very
| similar to the "knows what 'katana' means" ratio in TFA.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I know that Jaquard is a kind of loom, but I only know that
| because of an interest in early industrial manufacturing tech
| irrational wrote:
| Same. I have multiple undergraduate and graduate degrees and
| consider myself wide read. I knew every single "male" word and
| none of the "female" words. Though, I did have some recognition
| of a few of the "female" words, I just have no idea what their
| definition is.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I was shocked at first to see that most women didn't know what a
| "servo" was, then I remembered it means something different in
| Australia...
| abdel_nasser wrote:
| this is clearly the result of societal programming. i propose
| that we eliminate all of these words from the dictionaries. we
| dont need any of these words anyway.
| philipfweiss wrote:
| I played a game of codenames, where I was the only guy on a team.
| I had an awesome clue- Flashbang: 4.
|
| None of the women on my team knew what it meant. Every guy in the
| room did. We lost the game, but it was a very interesting social
| experiment.
| [deleted]
| rhaps0dy wrote:
| For the less masculine (or clued-in) members of the audience,
| what was the code word? Something to do with shooting games?
| mkipper wrote:
| In that game, the number said after the clue tells you how
| many of the words in play are related to the clue. So the
| word flashbang wouldn't be hinting at _a_ codeword, but four
| of them.
|
| So it could really be anything, e.g. bang, army, light and
| blind.
| kevinpet wrote:
| Probably "grenade". A flashbang grenade is a bright and loud
| but less destructive grenade used to startle people before an
| attack. Widely used by American police investigating
| possession of trivial amounts of marijuana.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Something police use to disorient and theoretically help
| disperse a crowd - like a grenade except it creates only a
| mostly-harmless noise and flash of light.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Since it's codenames, I would guess some of the words on the
| board they were hinting at would be WW2/war/call of
| duty/video games related stuff like France, Ear, Lag, Light,
| Hand, Hurt, Mud, Radio...
| hammock wrote:
| Love that story. Makes me think playing Codenames in German,
| where all kinds of words are made by mashing other words
| together, would be a great advantage over playing in English.
| arrrg wrote:
| Well, this rather makes the game annoying to play with people
| who think they are so clever and start constructing
| completely new words no one before them ever used. Which the
| rules don't allow, by the way.
|
| Sure, you can construct arbitrary new words in German. That
| works. However, that is certainly not the spirit of the game.
| Which the game does make abundantly clear in a quite long
| section of the rules. (I just got the game and its rules from
| our board game shelves, used the new OCR feature in iOS to
| copy and paste the relevant text into DeepL, cleaned up the
| translation and am now pasting it here with my own
| annotations in brackets. That was a cool experience.)
|
| Excerpt from the rules:
|
| Compound words
|
| German is notorious worldwide for its compound words. There
| are two ways to form such in German. ,,Tischdecke"
| (tablecloth) is one word. ,,Mehrzweck-Frasvorsatz" (multi
| purpose milling fixture) is in principle also a word, because
| the hyphen merely serves to make it easier to read. ,,Rindfle
| ischetikettierungsuberwachungsaufgabenubertragungsgesetz"
| (beef labeling monitoring tasks transfer law) actually used
| to be a real (and awful) word, which probably would have been
| a little easier to read with a few hyphens. (We won't discuss
| the bad habit of breaking up compound words in German with -
| incorrect - spaces here). Strictly speaking, then, all such
| words can be valid clues, but only if they correspond to
| actual usage. It is easy in German to simply invent
| composites: ,,Tentakeltrabant" (tentacle satellite) would
| theoretically be a great clue for ,,Oktopus" (octopus),
| ,,Mond" (moon), and ,,Auto" (car, because of the East German
| car ,,Trabant"), for example, but since it's only a word
| creation that you can't find in any dictionary, you can't use
| it.
|
| Prefixes
|
| This actually belongs to the previous rule, but should be
| mentioned explicitly: Simply turning a word into its opposite
| by putting a syllable like ,,kein-", ,,nicht-" or ,,un-"
| (non-, un-) in front of it should only be allowed if this
| word is colloquially used. ,,Unlebendig" (unalive) is
| therefore not a permitted clue for ,,Tod" (death), ,,untot"
| (undead) on the other hand would be permitted as a clue for
| ,,Skelett" (skeleton).
| Lio wrote:
| My favourite compound German word is Fledermausmann aka
| Batman.
|
| With the literal English translation of flying mouse man.
| suyjuris wrote:
| "Fledern" is not actually a German word (in any kind of
| common usage at least). A literal translation of flying
| would be "fliegen".
|
| Apparently the word fledermaus originates 1200 years ago
| and is derived from "flattern" (to flutter).
| curiousllama wrote:
| Love this
| 7steps2much wrote:
| When playing codenames in German you usually have the
| dictionary rule / Google rule.
|
| If you come up with a word and you aren't sure if it exists
| check if it is in the dictionary or if Google knows it.
|
| So no making up words like
|
| Mixerversicherungsfahrzeug
| rsynnott wrote:
| Hrm. I wonder did they just ask if people recognized them? I'd be
| very surprised if 40% of people could define 'azimuth', say.
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| I think that's all you can test with words. Separate the
| nonsense words from ones with a defined meaning.
| playdead wrote:
| I didn't know all the male-leaning words tbh, but it's not hard
| to have an educated guess that "neodymium" is probably a chemical
| element, thermister is probably something in physics related to
| thermodynamics, that a teraflop is computer-related (at first I
| thought, terabyte + floppy disk?), etc.
|
| Didn't know azimuth, aileron, or strafe but they're all cool, and
| I'm glad I learned.
|
| I'm surprised more people don't know who the yakuza are, but OK.
|
| I only learned about servos a couple years back in a maker-space
| YouTube channel.
| toyg wrote:
| _> I 'm surprised more people don't know who the yakuza are,
| but OK._
|
| Before the '80s, practically nobody outside Japan knew what the
| Yakuza was. Business development over that decade popularized
| its existence, so (American) writers picked it up, but after
| the cyberpunk wave (which abused it), it has largely fallen
| from favour as a narrative device outside Japan. Ironically,
| this mirrors somewhat the power the Yakuza can actually wield
| nowadays: after the Lost Decade of Japanese stagflation, and
| the rise of Eastern-European gangs (the real bosses of the
| globalized criminal network, at least in terms of raw
| "wetwork"), the Yakuza was significantly diminished.
| playdead wrote:
| Interesting. Yeah, I grew up in the 90s, so in addition to
| tamagotchi and pokemon, I became aware at some point about
| the Japanese mob.
| geuis wrote:
| Can someone help the layman here? I don't understand how to read
| that graph.
| lxe wrote:
| This is arts & crafts nerd words vs sci/tech nerd words
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Not a very big sample size but I do find it interesting how the
| males lean towards more technical terms. A result of sexism in
| education, not biological differences, I'm sure...
| martindbp wrote:
| I remember reading an article when I was a teenager about how
| very few men, but most women could tell whether a specific
| disease (don't remember which one) was caused by a virus or
| bacteria. It also claimed that the statistics were reversed for
| knowing whether the sun revolves around the earth or vice versa.
| I had no idea about the virus/bacteria thing, felt ridiculous to
| me. But intrigued, I asked my mother about the sun and earth and
| she responded: "I don't know, I've never even thought about it".
| Shocked to say the least. I learned that day that men and women
| are very different on average, despite being told otherwise my
| whole life.
| soueuls wrote:
| I would have never guessed that some people could hesitate
| between whether the Earth is revolving around the sun or not.
| Wow.
| abdel_nasser wrote:
| ever since the neolithic society has had a habit of trying
| really hard to gaslight people about utter nonsense. and all we
| got for it was bread and penicillin.
| tetsusaiga wrote:
| I wonder what the ages of the selected participants in the shown
| data set were.
|
| I recognized all of the male words, but I sent the female words
| to my girlfriend, and she barely knew any. She suggested that
| younger women might not know these words.
|
| That could just be a self-rationalization for not knowing them,
| but I didn't see the paper address the issue of age much, or
| generational changes.
|
| I wonder how that plays into this.
| francisofascii wrote:
| I suspect the 388 participants in this study were from top
| educational backgrounds. These words are very niche. So a pool
| of average people are not going to score 80-90% success on any
| of those words. That may also indicate why there is a such a
| large difference. When you compare people who are already at
| the extremes, you tend to see larger differences than comparing
| people at the mean.
| tombert wrote:
| Does teraflop really count as a "word" if it has an acronym as
| part of it?
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Why not?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Laser, sonar, radar. Many, if not most, acronyms become words
| on their own at some point in English, especially if they enter
| the popular lexicon (leave their initial niche).
| ticklemyelmo wrote:
| I'm more bothered by the omission of "s". The S in teraflops is
| not plural, it's part of the acronym.
|
| Your computer has 1 teraflop performance? One trillion floating
| point operations per _what_, then?
| djur wrote:
| Sure. "Laser" is a word too, and it's all acronym.
| shpx wrote:
| It's a shame that dictionaries don't collect and include this
| kind of data, since a word is the set of people that will
| understand that specific definition if you use it.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Along similar lines: names of colours, by gender:
|
| https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
| mcguire wrote:
| " _I weep for my gender._ "
| jdavis703 wrote:
| So men know words related to male dominated areas like physics,
| chemistry, electricity, crime and war. Women know words related
| to female dominated areas like fashion, grooming and women's
| health. I hate to say it, but water is wet.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Now I need to find my moist, used, taffeta katana.
|
| I knew almost all of the "feee-male" words, though, despite being
| cis-male, because of reading historical fiction that's not
| military wankery.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > because of reading historical fiction that's not military
| wankery.
|
| wondering what the gender breakdown is on that category?
| zestyping wrote:
| I'm really surprised "boson" did so well with women. Or, more
| precisely, that "boson" and "femtosecond" are so far apart.
| "Boson" seems far more obscure.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| It's surprising that _damask_ is so far below _katana_ for males.
| floxy wrote:
| All right, who is going to write the adaptive wordle that learns
| which answers are easiest for you, so that it can select the
| harder ones.
| kar5pt wrote:
| Did they really put "shemale" on the list?
| kokanee wrote:
| What's so weird about female tamales?
| Kye wrote:
| It's one of those words that was applied to people who had no
| real say in it, and some people are taking a bit to catch up
| now that trans and intersex people have an actual voice.
| There's no Grand Queer Consortium deciding it, so you'll find
| people who don't care, but it's broadly Not Okay now.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I'm super interested in the "shemale" terminology. What's the
| stark difference or explanation there? The others I can generally
| buy as nerd culture, but what does that have to do with a
| gendered slur?
|
| And similarly, why isn't there a similar reflection of at least
| one term of bigotry or ignorance specifically females are more
| likely to know?
| Leherenn wrote:
| Porn? I think a lot more males watch it than females.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Why aren't there women specific terms for the romance or
| erotica that women overwhelmingly consume then is my
| confusion. Because it's not like women don't get off. They
| just have different mediums to consume erotic content.
| Nebasuke wrote:
| I would assume that's the case because it's commonly used in
| pornography (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shemale)
| and males statistically watch more pornography.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Why isn't there a term overwhelmingly used in romance/erotica
| then, which is famously women-catered? And women consume a
| _lot_ of romance /erotica.
| throwaway48375 wrote:
| Can you think of one?
| mesozoic wrote:
| Sooo... I'm 42nd percentile on word knowledge I guess.
| kokanee wrote:
| What does it mean to "know" a word? I have heard/read most of the
| male words hundreds of times, and probably used them myself, but
| asked to define them I would be either inaccurate or unconfident.
| For example, I know that ailerons are flaps on an airplane, but
| I'm not sure which ones. I know that a femtosecond is a small
| unit of time, but I'm not sure what fraction of a second.
| azeirah wrote:
| In Wittgensteinian fashion, if you can use a word, you know it.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| I find that giving a precise "dictionary definition" of a word
| is actually quite hard in general for many common words.
|
| Anyway, the data is based on [1], which asks "I know this
| word"/"I don't know this word". It's also available in Dutch[2]
| which is a bit different and asks "this word exists"/"this word
| doesn't exist". Both tests include both actual words as well as
| made-up words. I did this test a few years back and my "score"
| was about 80% for Dutch (my native language) and 60% for
| English. I was a little but surprised by the fairly large gap
| between Dutch and English, since I've been speaking English
| almost exclusively for the last ten years (on account of living
| abroad), which goes to show just how hard it is to _really_
| learn a language to native-levels.
|
| [1]: http://vocabulary.ugent.be/wordtest/start
|
| [2]: http://woordentest.ugent.be/woordentest
| ksenzee wrote:
| I'm a woman software engineer, and I recognize every one of those
| as a word, which I think was the criterion being measured. (There
| are a few on each side I can't define but have definitely seen.)
| I'm mostly floored by how many of the textile words people here
| don't recognize, to the point of thinking they're "fake words."
| Have you never shopped for textiles for your house or apartment?
| I mean, espadrille, sure, that's a woman's shoe guys might not
| ever see the word for. But damask? Jacquard? Chenille? Do you not
| have curtains or a couch?
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Curtain blocks all light, couch needs to be comfortable for
| long stretches. What more do I need to know? My wife knew all
| words, male and female. She is a writer and translator and
| about some tech stuff I talk to much. But she couldn't care
| less what the couch or curtains are made off. She doesn't even
| care too much about the color; 'not black or white please'.
| yibg wrote:
| I'm male. My vocabulary for couch material are: leather and
| fabric. That's about it.
| gfd wrote:
| I was shopping for curtains recently but the stuff that I cared
| about were the technical specifications: how much light it
| blocks, thermal properties, noise reduction, etc. What _should_
| I be looking for instead?
| brimble wrote:
| Ditto. As a guy I know three kinds of curtain: "black out",
| kinda blocks light sort of, and lets most of the light
| through.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _But damask? Jacquard? Chenille? Do you not have curtains or
| a couch?_
|
| I recognized chenille (but couldn't remember what it meant,
| outside of knowing it was textile-related), but I'd never heard
| of damask or jacquard before. I do own my own home, but
| actually don't have curtains (blinds/shades instead). I do have
| a couch (three of them!), and these words never came up. I was
| just given giant books of fabric swatches, and I chose by look
| and feel. I don't recall any of them having descriptive names
| with technical terms, just a marketing name and item number.
| Wiseacre wrote:
| Are you sure you aren't confusing chenille for Chanel? I made
| that mistake.
| showerst wrote:
| Guy here -- I vaguely recognized most of the fabrics, but I've
| bought plenty of couches and never shopped for a fabric by
| name, I just find a nice looking thing and flip through the
| swatches book until I find one I like. The only one there
| that's really recognizable by name in male clothes maybe is
| chambray.
|
| I've never bought curtains, only blinds.
|
| I recognized espadrilles because they make those for guys, but
| they're not common.
| ksenzee wrote:
| I had no idea they made espadrilles for men! (eta: or that
| they _called_ men 's shoes like that espadrilles.)
| Lio wrote:
| Yeah, Don Johnson used to wear them on Miami Vice back in
| the day.
| showerst wrote:
| I only know them because I shop at huckberry, but maybe
| they're just winging it =). It seems like Toms makes
| espadrilles for men that were popular for a hot minute
| there.
| [deleted]
| brimble wrote:
| Guys (broadly) don't care what the name of the fabric on their
| furniture is, or what their curtains are made of, and _do not_
| shop using those terms. Even getting _very_ slightly into male
| fashion has put me far ahead of most guys as far as knowing
| words _common in male fashion_. The vast majority of guys don
| 't give a damn what "twill" is, or "bluchers", let alone what
| you call the kind of uphostry on their couch.
|
| I recognized some of the fabric words. Were I not married, I
| would have recognized far fewer. I couldn't have told you what
| most of them actually mean, just that they're to do with
| fabric.
|
| [EDIT] In fact, on reflection, I find it surprising that
| _women_ (generally) shop for furniture based on anything to do
| with the kind of fabric on them, or would be particularly
| likely to be able to tell you what kind of fabric is on their
| furniture. I 've always known women to shop for uphostered
| furniture the same way guys do, which is by looking at options
| until they see something that looks OK, then sitting on it to
| test. Curtains are another story. I'm pretty sure my wife does
| put in fabric names when searching for curtains, and might be
| able to name what some of ours are.
|
| Shopping for uphostered furniture based on fabric type seems
| more like a rich/poor divide than male/female, to me. Like, it
| doesn't even get interesting until you're _way_ out of most
| people 's price range, does it?
| rcoveson wrote:
| > Shopping for uphostered furniture based on fabric type
| seems more like a rich/poor divide than male/female, to me.
| Like, it doesn't even get interesting until you're way out of
| most people's price range, does it?
|
| That doesn't stop car people who can only own a single,
| entry-level car from caring about all sorts of dimensions
| that don't meaningfully affect the boring commuter
| experience. And each of those dimensions has vocabulary words
| associated with it, which adds to the fun. If you feel a
| connection with a domain, be it furniture or computer
| hardware, you learn all the words and form lots of
| impractical opinions (again, because fun). It's not exclusive
| to rich people.
|
| All the fabric, fashion, and color stuff probably has all
| sorts of cultural implications. "Seersucker" just "screams"
| "summer", or something. Stuff like that. It's fun. But you
| only have space for so much of it in your head, so with all
| the other categories of things, you just go based on surface-
| level experience. Maybe there's a correlation between wealth
| and the number of topics you have lots of highly-specific
| opinions about? But my guess based on experience is that it's
| a personality trait independent of wealth.
| brimble wrote:
| AFAIK nearly all upholstry for the furniture most people
| buy is either fake leather of one sort or another, or some
| kind of boring synthetic fabric. Kinda like how all wall-
| to-wall carpet most people buy is synthetic fiber and not
| very interesting, until you get into stuff outside most
| people's price range, when things like wool and all kinds
| of weaves and styling and textures enter the picture. Below
| that it's like: How thick pile? Feel good on feet (if
| you're not used to better) because only cheap, or feel bad
| on feet because _very_ cheap? With maybe some patterning
| considerations for very low-pile carpet. (to be clear, that
| 's the price range I'm usually operating in when looking at
| that kind of thing, too--there's not much to get excited
| about)
|
| I'd expect all the interesting choices with names that
| carry over into other parts of fashion not to enter the
| picture, with furniture, until you start to head into
| "designer" territory. The big overstuffed things out on the
| floor with price tags attached and big "SALE!" signs and
| such, seem rather same-y.
| rcoveson wrote:
| Sure, but again, think of the relationship with furniture
| and fashion like the typical male relationship with cars.
| Magazines, movies, celebrities, blogs, shopping way
| outside your price range without any intent to buy when
| you have nothing to do... I imagine all these things
| apply. Most guys I know learned about cars from hours of
| Top Gear, and drive used Honda Accords. I'll bet there's
| an equivalent for learning and caring about fabrics,
| furniture, and clothing.
| brimble wrote:
| Of course enthusiasts exist, I'm just skeptical that
| women knowing the names of fabric on their furniture is
| at all common _under a certain SES level_ , at least.
| I've seen women care about and know the names of fabric
| in curtains, use those kinds of words to describe them,
| and shop using those words, in multiple cases. I've
| _never_ seen it with furniture, but I also don 't know
| anyone who can/would spend money on interior designers,
| go to the scary rich-people (for very small values of
| "rich") section of Nebraska Furniture Mart except out of
| curiousity, order custom or trendy vintage furniture et
| c. The most sylish and best-looking (but not most
| expensive) furniture I see in my regular life is from
| Ikea.
|
| I can't even say for sure I've ever _sat_ on a chair that
| wasn 't just some undoubtedly-very-cheap weave of
| polyester or something else along those lines, but that's
| because my friends and family range (in background and
| attitudes, if not in income) from the Fussellian low-
| prole through his Middle. I'm _assuming_ there are
| interesting fabric choices in the stores (or parts of
| stores) that no-one I know shops in, but there don 't
| seem to be out in the po' folks' sections, where the
| majority of people shop. Doubling (or more) the price of
| a couch to get a kind of fabric worth remembering isn't
| on the table for most people--except, yes, maybe
| enthusiasts or people rich enough that that's the _only_
| kind of furniture they buy.
| Jensson wrote:
| Have you ever touched a katana, travelled a parsec, had
| trouble with the yakuza or seen a howitzer fire in
| person? No probably not, and even if you did others
| haven't, all of those things people know since you are
| interested in and consume action/adventure media.
|
| Consider a person who don't care at all about
| action/adventure stuff. They just care about making the
| nicest home possible. They read books about it, watch TV
| shows about it, watch movies about it, and remembers
| those details and forgets about all the actiony nonsense.
| Why wouldn't they know words of things they will likely
| never posses themselves? It is the same concept.
| [deleted]
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| As a male software engineer, married and homeowner for 25+
| years, I can honestly say I know almost none of those fabric-
| related terms. As in, don't even remember hearing them before.
|
| I hardly even _think_ about curtains, couch covers, etc. At
| most it 's briefly, when we're shopping for that stuff. I'm
| super happy to leave those details up to my wife, who cares
| about them more than I do.
| nverno wrote:
| I actually thought it was a study in a foreign language until
| getting to the bottom half. I did just buy a carpet the other
| day, but I don't think that involved any of those textile
| words.
| golergka wrote:
| > Have you never shopped for textiles for your house or
| apartment?
|
| No, never, and never plan on doing it. I currently rent, live
| alone and don't care. If I ever move in with someone again and
| that person cares, they will make all the decisions themselves,
| and if they don't, we'll just default to whatever's already in
| the apartment or hire interior designer if we'll be renovating.
|
| And that said, I'm still an outlier in male population because
| I like male fashion, obsess with Rick Owens, Margiela,
| Alexander McQueen and some local brands, have my nails painted
| and wear a lot of accessories.
| lhorie wrote:
| > Have you never shopped for textiles
|
| I mean, this[0] meme pretty much sums it up
|
| [0] https://i.kym-
| cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/441/150/c01...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My bachelor pad looked exactly like that except I had a
| sofabed instead of the recliner; surely everyone has _one_
| friend that refuses to sleep on the floor?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I don't see the issue either.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| The single chair is a metaphor for loneliness and/or the
| death of couch co-op
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I don't really have a problem sitting on the floor. It's
| carpeted.
| brimble wrote:
| From the image: "guys really live in apartments like this and
| don't see any issue"
|
| And we mean it. I see only two problems:
|
| 1) no extra seating for pals--c'mon, at least add a couple
| bean bags and a couple folding trays (in fairness, those may
| be put away off-frame), if you're not even playing local
| multiplayer or having friends over to watch TV/movies, why
| even bother with this much?
|
| 2) it'll probably turn off any woman who sees it.
|
| So not enough seating and women won't like it, are the _only_
| reasons I wouldn 't be totally OK living like that if I were
| single.
|
| [EDIT] I spotted a third problem! There's not a Gamecube or
| N64 or Dreamcast sitting on the floor halfway between the TV
| and chair.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| The chair-TV axis should run the other way, so you can walk
| from the door to the kitchenette without bumping into the
| chair. Other than that yeah... it's fine... I'm not gonna
| shame people for being minimal.
| [deleted]
| wickoff wrote:
| What do you mean textiles? We just buy the gray-ish ones.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Don't be surprised that gender that mainly dresses in jeans and
| t-shirts doesn't recognize many textiles beyond denim and
| cotton fabric.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| My wife is a dressmaker so I know every word you mentioned.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| As a trans woman (assigned male at birth, lived as a boy / guy
| for 20+ years) - I barely know what "textile" is. It means
| "fabric", right? It's the thing that textile factories make.
|
| > Do you not have curtains or a couch?
|
| The house has the same curtains it had when we moved in.
| They're ugly, and I just ignore them. Except for the front
| window, where my spouse changed them for some reason.
|
| My old apartment also had the same curtains it always had.
|
| I have 3 couch-ish objects:
|
| - A $100 futon that I bought when I first moved out to use as a
| combo bed / couch. My spouse also replaced the mattress on
| there, probably with something cheap off Amazon.
|
| - A very cheap loveseat of unknown origin that a friend gave
| me.
|
| - An old sleeper couch from my parents' house that they didn't
| want.
|
| I think Jacquard is the guy who invented the loom that they
| teach about in every CS 101 class.
|
| But no, I don't know what damask and Chenille are.
|
| I actually love clothes shopping! I just don't think about
| furniture. It's so heavy and bulky. I love buying dresses but I
| don't think about fabrics. I know there's cotton, and denim,
| and fake leather, and then there's fabrics I never think about.
|
| I don't decorate the house, I decorate myself. Sparingly.
|
| Edit: For shoes I have "boots", "sandals", "sneakers", and
| "heels". I go to the thrift store and see what looks good and
| fits, and then I buy it. Sometimes I buy new shoes too, but I
| don't like dress clothes, so I just eyeball it without thinking
| about names.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Respectfully, can I ask a couple questions?
|
| - Do you see yourself as a "new" or "recent" woman who's
| learning about female things now? (E.g. did you know what a
| pessary was? Did you read women's magazines in the before
| times?)
|
| - Did your preferred sex (e.g. women for straight males)
| remain the same? Do you identify as straight or gay (or none
| of the above?)
|
| It's none of my business, other than it helps me situate you
| (and maybe inductively other trans women) in these male-
| female ML things.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Sure, I love questions.
|
| I still don't know what a pessary is. I didn't really read
| women's magazines before I transitioned, and I still don't.
|
| I feel fine being a tomboy with "guy" interests. It's not
| an end goal of mine to go "stealth" (That is, pass as cis
| 100% of the time) or fit in to any female-coded social
| group in particular. Transitioning is something I do for
| myself, so presenting feminine but still being a little bit
| "masculine" in my interests and hobbies just doesn't bother
| me.
|
| I've always been attracted to women, so I went from being a
| straight guy to being a lesbian. There's a few specific
| heterosexual scenarios where I can identify with the woman
| now, but not enough to say I'm attracted to men in general.
|
| > it helps me situate you (and maybe inductively other
| trans women) in these male-female ML things.
|
| Yeah I'm definitely speaking for myself here. The only
| things that are likely to be true of all trans women is
| that they use (or want to use, if they're still in the
| closet) she/her pronouns, and that they were not assigned
| female at birth.
|
| Everything else can vary:
|
| - Lots of trans people want to be stealth. It's safer on
| average, but I live in a queer-friendly town
|
| - Not everyone wants to reclaim "queer" but personally I
| don't want to type out LGBTQIAA+ every time...
|
| - Some trans people report that their sexuality changes (or
| they realize they're actually asexual) after they begin
| transitioning or after they begin hormone therapy. It isn't
| clear what percent of this is caused by the hormones and
| what percent is purely psychological.
|
| - Most trans women don't say things like "I used to be a
| guy". I don't have an internal sense of gender, so I don't
| feel like the common story of "I was always a woman on the
| inside" applies to me, even though it applies to many trans
| women. When I was younger, people assumed I was male and I
| was fine with it, so I don't feel wrong to say I used to be
| a boy or used to be a guy. I transitioned when I decided
| that I didn't need an internal sense of gender - If I
| wanted to be a woman on the outside, that's all I needed,
| and maybe for me in particular, I only have an outside.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| > But damask? Jacquard? Chenille? Do you not have curtains or a
| couch?
|
| I'm pretty utility driven when it comes to curtains or couches.
| I'm just looking for something which does what it is supposed
| to and is not hideous. How does knowing damask, jacquard, and
| chenille help with determining if curtains block light and a
| couch is comfortable when I sit in it?
| Tade0 wrote:
| > Do you not have curtains or a couch?
|
| Couch is couch.
|
| Anyway I have two sisters and remember not understanding how
| and when did they learn those words.
|
| I do recognize some of those words, but as a non-native English
| speaker I was surprised about their spelling.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Don't worry, native English speakers are _also_ surprised
| about their spelling.
| rory wrote:
| Any curtains I've ever bought are "the ones they have at Home
| Depot." Fabrics with fancy French names seem like rich people
| things, regardless of gender, no?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| >> espadrille, sure, that's a woman's shoe guys might not ever
| see the word for. But damask? Jacquard? Chenille? Do you not
| have curtains or a couch?
|
| Ironically, Espadrille is the only word on that shortened list
| I ever heard of... but I think mostly because in my country its
| definition was expanded - certainly there were tons of
| Espadrilles for men. That may or many not be universal.
|
| Literally Everything else on the purple list... no clue.
|
| I do have curtains and a couch. FWIW I am a home owner in my
| 3rd owned residence (Condo, small house, medium house). I have
| never ever _ever_ geeked out or cared about their material, by
| name, so I suppose there 's a world still awaiting for me :)
|
| Anyhoo, I do feel that the two lists are not symmetrical. It
| feels that one is fairly clustered around
| fashion/style/materials, whereas the other, while still having
| common threads, has technology, science, physics, video games,
| and nerdery. But is that exposing simply another kind of bias
| in me? Because the "male" words are familiar to me, I see more
| diversity in them than the unfamiliar words? Food for thought,
| but I still think bushido, shemale and terraflops are different
| categories regardless of gender :D
|
| Fwiw, my classification:
|
| Aileron - airplanes; howizter, bushido, katana - military;
| shemale - porn; strafe - FPS/gaming presumably; Yakuza - gangs;
| boson, milliamp,gauss, piezoelectricity, etc - physics;
| checksum, teraflop - comsci; parsec... physics, technically,
| but SciFi, practically :P
|
| vs:
|
| fashion/clothes/hair: peplum, boucle, ruche, chignon, tulle,
| chenille, voile, bandeau, kohl,espadrille, whipstitch, sateen,
| jacquard, damask, chambray
|
| Verbena, Fressia - flower
|
| pessary, doula - health
| brimble wrote:
| > strafe - FPS/gaming presumably;
|
| Could be the reason so many guys know it, but it's another
| term with military connections. I was aware of it from
| military sci fi before I ever encountered it in a gaming
| context.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _...Do you not have curtains or a couch?_
|
| I've owned a home for over 15 years, and I still don't have
| curtains because it is too overwhelming. Current couch is Ikea,
| so I just wrote down the number, next couch will be leather.
|
| Edit: One thing I know about fabric is that linen is made from
| flax, in 2016 I took a tour at a revolutionary war house where
| they used to make linen. I only went in because there was a
| pokemon in it, but it was still very interesting.
| samgtx wrote:
| Most men have no style or appreciation for aesthetics and take
| pride in that fact. Then they wonder why women gravitate toward
| attractive, well dressed men with nice condos. Ha.
| rjbwork wrote:
| I don't think anyone wonders why, lol.
| JabavuAdams wrote:
| > Have you never shopped for textiles for your house or
| apartment?
|
| 45 years old, and no. Why would I do that? All my furniture and
| drapes are pretty much IKEA. I have some interest in clothing,
| but aside from the occasional Hallowe'en death cloak don't know
| much about fabrics other than cotton/polyester/nylon.
|
| A minute shopping is a minute wasted, in terms of my interests.
| I don't want to spend any time thinking about it unless I have
| to, in order to accomplish some other goal. I tend to
| standardize on colours / outfits / style to make sure I don't
| spend much mental energy on fashion or shopping, while still
| not looking like I don't "get" it.
| simsla wrote:
| Recently bought new curtains, and I selected on size, colour
| and made sure they were blackout curtains.
|
| For the life of me (literally) I wouldn't be able to name the
| fabric.
| skykooler wrote:
| Not only do I have a couch, I made it and upholstered it
| myself. But I don't know what fabric it's covered with - it was
| just labeled as "upholstery fabric" at Joanne Fabrics, and I
| picked it because it looked sturdy and would fit with the
| room's color scheme.
| saberience wrote:
| I think that's the point of the article :)
| Hello71 wrote:
| It's worth noting that, based on the paper, this is really "words
| known better by males (who complete free online quizzes) than by
| females (who complete free online quizzes)". This likely explains
| a significant amount of the fashion and video game words. For
| example, it seems unlikely to me that 60% of all US and UK women
| know the word "peplum", but reasonably plausible that US and UK
| women who complete free quizzes on the internet also spend more
| time browsing clothes on the internet than the average woman, and
| would therefore have more knowledge than the average woman about
| clothing terminology.
| hammock wrote:
| You don't have to buy clothes on the internet to know what a
| peplum or other clothing terms are. Most clothes are not bought
| online.
| rubylark wrote:
| I'm going to disagree here. I'm a woman and I had the same
| results as every man replying here: I recognized all the
| science, game, and action terms and almost none of the
| fashion and textile ones. Never once when I have gone clothes
| or makeup shopping (always exclusively in person) have I
| encountered any of those terms, written or otherwise. I feel
| I might have been more familiar if I actually shopped online
| where these words might be displayed.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| What does knowing all of them say about me? O_o
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Guess you're non-binary lol
| handmodel wrote:
| This is very interesting!
|
| Would love to see a similar list but weight by the ratio of men
| who don't know versus women who don't know aka words that known
| by 90% of males and 80% of females (or visa versa). This is very
| interesting but not that surprised that many people don't know
| boson or servo or checksum or technical words.
| ru552 wrote:
| N = 388
| telesilla wrote:
| I am a tech nerd woman brought up in a seamstress/gardener
| household. Every single word I have no issue defining and using
| in context. However, I shared this with a group of women who are
| not in tech or fashion and they didn't know much either. I think
| this is pretty flawed.
| FabHK wrote:
| Very useful if you ever participate in a Turing Test (original
| version, ie the imitation game).
| zuminator wrote:
| My initial impression glancing at that list was that it was maybe
| taken from a survey of French speakers, because the first few
| words looked totally alien to me. Then I recognized freesia, then
| a few more words coalesced. All told, I'm more or less familiar
| with only 5-7 of the "female" words but every single one of the
| "male" words are very familiar to me.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Reminds me of Randall Munroe's hilarious report on his color
| survey, specifically the section on gender differences:
| https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
| olalonde wrote:
| Would have been a good idea to throw in a word that doesn't exist
| to get a feel of how honest the answers were.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I'm skeptical half the men really know what piezoelectricity
| is, for example. Much less 75% being able to define boson.
| Maybe if the survey was at an engineering college.
| wolf550e wrote:
| "familiar with the word" doesn't mean "knows exact definition
| or the facts from the first paragraph of the wikipedia
| article".
|
| "a boson is a particle in physics" would be adequate
| definition, no need to actually know the details. Similarly,
| "piezoelectricity" is "the thing used in electric cigarette
| lighters / guitar pickups", no need for details. Women who
| know about fabrics don't necessarily know how they are
| manufactured.
| Symmetry wrote:
| It's fuzzy. I know exactly what a terraflop is including that
| most people use it to refer to 32 bit floating point
| operations by default but it can still mean other widths if
| specified. I thought a parsec was somewhere between 2 and 20
| light years which is correct but still imprecise. I know
| damask is a fabric associated with dresses I've run into in
| books but have no idea what it looks like. So do I know 1, 2,
| or 3 of those words? It's fuzzy.
| Karsteski wrote:
| I feel like anyone who did secondary school physics would
| have come across piezoelectricity though? I certainly did.
| macintux wrote:
| I suspect by "knowing the word" the implication is "familiar
| with/have encountered", vs "being able to define correctly".
| mcguire wrote:
| The study was literally picking words from non-words.
| andrewla wrote:
| The underlying study, at http://vocabulary.ugent.be/, gives
| nonsense words in addition to real words to establish a
| baseline.
| random-human wrote:
| LouisSayers wrote:
| Interesting that many people here know many of the words.
|
| I knew 10 of the male ones and zero of the female...
|
| I'm from New Zealand, it'd be interesting to do this same
| experiment in NZ / Aus to see what the percentages are.
|
| I suspect that the average NZ vocabulary is quite low...
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| If I'm reading this right, the results were gathered via setting
| up a website, spreading the word, and allowing anyone visiting
| the website to participate. I'd expect these results would mostly
| only be relevant to the "very online."
| in_cahoots wrote:
| Yeah, these results don't pass the smell test. As a woman, I
| sincerely doubt the percentages quoted for terms like pessary
| and doula- if you and your peers aren't having children you're
| unlikely to have heard of them. And doulas are a more recent
| phenomenon in the US, I doubt many women over 60 or women in
| lower socioeconomic classes are familiar with the term.
|
| Same for men. I can't believe most men know what a checksum is.
| This test says more about the population of people who took it
| than anything else.
| Nebasuke wrote:
| It looked reasonable to me. Pessary was part of regular sex
| education for my school. I was surprised the numbers were so
| low, but this might be sex education in the US not discussing
| this.
|
| Checksum you'll encounter as a term when you use newsgroups,
| torrents and often on the download page as an MD5 checksum
| when you download software.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| I just learned about pessary last month, after my second
| child and two different sex ed curricula.
|
| And what percent of American adults use newsgroups or
| torrents, or even download software these days? It's surely
| not the majority (software downloads notwithstanding).
| altairprime wrote:
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