1.
“Comfy shoes”
The word “comfy” is alien and bizarre to me. It’s hard for me to come up with the circumstances in which I would feel compelled to use it, or in which anyone should. It’s obnoxious. It has the annoying high-frequency vibration of a pre-teen sleepover.
Although I see no place for the word in everyday conversation, there is one place where I think it could do some pleasant damage: With a thick dose of irony, in the hands of a good humorist. If we’re keeping a list of words with humor potential, I think this one could be up there with sandwich and pants.
But it’s funny for different reasons. Most words are funny because they sound funny, but I don’t think that’s the case with this one. I checked my mental bank account and I can’t recall ever hearing a dude employ the word. It’s hard for me to even imagine him doing so with a straight face. And in that lies its humor potential: The absurdity of its use by a male.
Combine it with “shoes” and now we have a phrase that is probably at least 99.99% female. It’s probably the most female-skewed phrase I can come up with. When a dude is searching for adjectives to describe his shoes, ones that may come to mind include “brown” or “formal” or maybe even “worn-in,” but comfy? No. Not that. We’d be more likely to describe our shoes as pillowy, I think.
2.
I was in a meeting today with three female colleagues as they were critiquing a PowerPoint presentation I had created. One of the critiques had to do with the font color, and this is when I started to feel very male. “Could we make that more of a rust?,” one of the women asked.
I paused.
Rust. Okay. I am familiar with the stuff that coats a bike left in the rain. But holy shit you expect me to select this as a color from PowerPoint’s menu bar? I have a few ideas in my head of what you could mean by rust, but dammit, have you seen rust? This is a substance that is characterized by its varying colors(!). Wait, are you just playing with my masculine brain? Is this some kind of female inside joke to watch a male squirm when we describe a color as something other than red, blue, or green?
All of these thoughts went through my head as I tried to formulate a response.
“Rust?,” I finally replied.
After some deliberation, we determined that what was meant by “rust” was dark red. Having that out of the way, I felt relieved but still confused. Why couldn’t she have just said “dark red”? A Google Image search for rust turns up colors ranging from dark browns to yellows to bright oranges to blues – practically the whole spectrum from a male POV. How could you expect a dude to know what you are talking about? Most puzzling of all, why weren't the other women baffled like me?
This, to me, is one of the great mysteries of women: Do ya’ll really know what each other are talking about when you describe colors as “rust” or “cantaloupe” or what-have-you? Honestly, you could tell me you do, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to my befuddlement. If I am going to believe this, I am going to need to see a double-blind study. With EEGs.
If there exists some sort of strange covert female understanding of color descriptors, I want to know where they learn them. We covered the color wheel in art class, but I can guarantee you, “honeydew” was not part of the discussion. It doesn’t even seem that the 120-pack of Crayolas covers the wide spectrum of female descriptors. This seems to be a highly creative process for them. It’s like they describe colors based on objects that fit the hue in their mental bank, which is fine, but then to able to translate that to another human being and have them get it — that’s beyond me.
Scarier still, if women can speak in code about colors, who knows what else they might be saying in front of our clueless faces. I just shuddered a little.
(P.S. - It’s clear that a male designed the Microsoft color selector because it only has the basic colors with percentages. Ha. Eat it, women.)
Also, here is a graphical illustration of what I’m talking about. (Hat tip: Anna.) Notice the dude’s befuddlement.
(Somewhat related: In an awesome post, Kerry announces that the color of the hallway in her new home is called, hilariously, "Magnificent Crouton.")
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Both of today’s observations are things that women tend to do/say that men tend not to. Being male, it’s much easier to make those kinds of observations than vice versa. I’d like to hear from the women in the audience what things men tend to do/say that women tend not to.
Also, I suspect that both of today's observations will be familiar to the dudes in the audience, but I wonder if women are less aware of these things.
