Being Human

Study: 'Clean' Smells Inspire Moral High Ground - TIME
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Yesterday, most of the comments on The communicative properties of footwear dealt with the gender associations of the word cute. This linguistic stereotype is often used as the basis of comic-strip humor, frequently in the context of shopping, as in this Foxtrot strip from a few years ago:

And (with a twist) in this Preteena from 6/24/2009:

But in fact, the word cute really is used much more often by women than by men, in modern American culture.

In a study based on a sample taken in 2004 (and described in "What men and women blog about", 7/8/2007), cute was the tenth most feminine word (as quantified by information gain), after hubby, husband,  adorable, skirt, boyfriend, mommy, yummy, kisses, and gosh. But male bloggers in that sample still used cute with a frequency of 83 per million words — it's just that the female bloggers used it with a frequency of 232 per million words — about 2.8 times more often.

In a large corpus of American English telephone conversations, the apparent femininity of cute was somewhat greater, at least as measured by the ratio of female use to male use — it was used 974 times in 15,685 female conversational sides, and only 214 times in 12,589 male conversational sides, for a ratio (corrected to account for the different numbers of conversational participants) of about 3.65. In comparison, the corrected ratio for shopping was only 3.01, and pink was only 2.12. (These transcribed conversations were mostly collected in 2003, but a significant minority were collected in 1990-91.)

In fact, cute was the most female-associated adjective among several candidates that I tried:

Female Male Ratio Corrected ratio cute 974 214 4.55 3.65 adorable 57 13 4.38 3.52 gorgeous 241 76 3.17 2.55 lovely 168 57 2.94 2.37 pink 74 28 2.74 2.12 beautiful 1378 865 1.59 1.28 little 21017 15490 1.36 1.09 strange 1176 921 1.28 1.02 big 11500 9761 1.18 0.95 weird 1451 1731 0.84 0.67 cool 4951 6207 0.80 0.64 tough 1307 1765 0.74 0.59 lame 40 67 0.60 0.48

(The raw ratios of counts are multiplied by 12589/15685 in the column labelled "corrected ratio", in order to get the ratio of rates per conversation. The average number of words per conversational side was nearly the same for the sexes, with men being about 6% talkier, so to get per-word ratios, another small correction would be needed, which would raise the corrected ratio for cute to about 3.87.)

The gender divergence was greater for several nouns, with husband being more than 15 times commoner in the women's speech, and wife about 5 times commoner in men's speech:

Female Male Ratio Corrected ratio husband 9168 484 18.94 15.20 boyfriend 1080 129 8.37 6.72 babies 570 122 4.67 3.75 shopping 1140 304 3.75 3.01 clothes 731 309 2.37 1.90 dinner 1093 507 2.16 1.73 shoes 608 382 1.59 1.28 baseball 1691 1720 0.98 0.79 dollars 6788 7880 0.86 0.69 cars 791 972 0.81 0.65 beer 230 388 0.59 0.48 girlfriend 612 1044 0.59 0.48 man 2889 5204 0.56 0.45 beers 25 75 0.33 0.27 wife 925 3786 0.24 0.20

[Update — Kenny Easwaran asks

[W]as there any interesting difference in use of these words based on the gender of the other conversational participant? It seems plausible that "cute" may be used more often with a female conversational partner than with a male one.

The answer:

female interlocutor male interlocutor female speaker
762 in 10784
(7.06 per 100) 212 in 4901
(4.33 per 100) male speaker 103 in 4901
(2.10 per 100) 111 in 7688
(1.44 per 100)

In other words, when a female speaker had a female conversational partner, there 762 instances of cute in 10,784 conversations, for a rate of 7.06 cutes per 100 conversations. And so on…

So indeed, both women and men tended to use "cute" somewhat more often when talking with a woman than when talking with with a man.]

Study: 'Clean' Smells Inspire Moral High Ground
TIME
A paper published last year in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin revealed that people are more critical and judgmental about certain moral ...

and more »

Two named EKU education extension agents to serve Boyle, Garrard, Lincoln and ...
Danville Advocate
She has taught business classes in Japan and was a developmental psychology instructor at Lexington Community College. She also has owned and managed two ...

Two Cathy strips on this topic that I've been saving up:

The last time I posted one of Cathy Guisewite's strips, a reader muttered something about "drivel" and suggested that "for the love of all that is just and holy" we immediately read David Malki's essay on the topic — which struck me as a well-written and carefully-sourced explanation of something that's not exactly a secret, namely that Cathy is mostly about gender stereotypes, and especially stereotypes about consumption.

So to underline the scientific character of my interest in these documents, I'll point interested readers to Andrew's Wilson's home page, which includes this passage:

The Linguistic Construction of Cultural Meanings -
"The Language of Shoes"

In the context of an ongoing research project, known for convenience as "The Language of Shoes", I am attempting to approach the cultural system of footwear fashions from the twin orientations of onomasiology and cultural studies - in other words, I want to find out which terms languages use for footwear styles and what associative meanings these words and objects have within a culture. I see this work as an extension of the Wörter-und-Sachen paradigm pioneered in the early twentieth century, which married onomasiology, etymology, and cultural studies - "from the trivial to the sublime" (Hüllen 1990: 141) - within a strongly object-oriented linguistics. However, my work gives much more emphasis than did the original Wörter-und-Sachen scholars to value judgements and to the constructivist nature of culture.

I'll also link to a few publications from this project: Wilson and Moudraia, "Interactive effects of shoe style and verbal cues on perceptions of female physicians' personal attributes", 2003; "Business organizations' awareness of the communicative properties of footwear: results of a pilot survey on the regulation of footwear with female employee uniforms in a major Polish city", The Language of Shoes Project Working Paper, 2004; "Corporate Values and Cultural Discourses of Footwear : The Case of Female Flight Attendants", Empirical Text and Culture Research, 2009; "British military women in civilian knee-high dress boots : a neglected episode in women's uniform history", Minerva Journal of Women and War, 2009.

However, the key collocation "cute shoes!" doesn't seem to occur in Wilson's oeuvre, so Cathy still has something to contribute to the discussion of onomasiological performativity.

While strolling through town the other day, I came across this fantastic memory and brain-themed poster.

It's from the University of Antioquia's museum who are holding an art and literature competition to celebrate 200 years of Colombian independence.

Click the image for a bigger version or hit the link below if you want to see it in all its glory.

Link to bigger version.

Herding the Sheep
Prison Planet.com
Per the social psychology research, this “you are in a minority, you are wrong” message DOES dissuade a lot of people. It is remarkably poisonous. ...

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Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

The single best article you'll read on technology and the brain for a while is published in The Times. 300 words of sense.

The Sydney Morning Herald covers an inattentional blindness study in mobile phone users and asks 'Did you see that unicycling clown?' I'm more interested to know whether the unicycling clown saw the psychologist following him around all day.

Apart from the fact that she seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that the right temporal parietal junction is not used for anything else (it is) there's an excellent TED talk by Rebecca Saxe on 'theory of mind' and the neuroscience of inferring others' mental states.

Neurophilosophy covers on how electrodes planted into the open brain of an awake patient reveals the neural dynamics of speech. Accompanied by an equally as awesome image.

The anthropology song is featured on Neuroanthropology.

The Neurocritic finds an intriguing film about a professor who believes she has found a way of determining scientifically whether someone is in love.

Philosopher Stephen Stich gives four lectures on 'Moral Theory Meets Cognitive Science' which are collected at 3 Quarks Daily.

Dr Petra has been upgraded!

Another good TED talk, this time by Beau Lotto on what optical illusions tell us about perception.

Science News on research that a gene involved in vocal cord development may be a factor in a inherited speech disorder.

There's a brief Q&A on the science of persuasion over at Nature.

The BPS Research Digest covers some heart-warming research on how a heated room makes people feel socially closer.

You can read a free taster issue of November's The Psychologist here. Enjoy!

Scientific American's Mind Matters blog has a great piece on making errors and learning.

Another good Neurophilosophy post, on how immediate goal kicking performance in American 'foot' 'ball' affects the perception of how big the goal seems.

Science News reports that 'People can control their Halle Berry neurons'. Neurons? I have enough trouble trying to control my Halle Berry thoughts. Don't think of Catwoman. Damn.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is an American nonprofit, grassroots, self-help, support and advocacy organization of consumers, families, and friends of people with severe mental illnesses that happens to receive 75% of its funding from Big Pharma, according to The New York Times.

Cognitive Daily asks What does it take to get kids to eat healthy foods? Personally, I bribe them with cans of Red Bull.

There's on excellent piece on how antidepressant sales are rising despite depression diagnoses falling in the UK over at Neuroskeptic. Apparently, longer-term treatment is now the norm.

FAILBlog has a hilarious duck phobia fail.

To the bunkers! H+ Magazine reports on robots controlled by human brain cells. Let's hope they're not the Halle Berry neurons.

Slashdot commentor kindly lists all the Doctor Who references to robots controlled by organic brains.

I found this great article on drug counterfeiting from a 1961 edition of Popular Mechanics.

BoingBoing has an interesting snippet on a new NIH study which will deploy robo-calling for boozers and stoners. Press 1 if you're taking a bong hit?

Happy belated Fechner Day.

Language Log asks 'Is irony universal?'. Rather ironically, asked by Americans. Also some interesting observations in the comments from Danny O'Brien.

Insecurity + power = boss rage, according to a new study covered by Neuronarrative.

The New York Times has a piece by David Brooks who marvels at how "damned young, hip and attractive" neuroscientists are. I would just like to disavow this dreadful stereotyping and point out that, like myself, many competent neuroscientists look pretty rough and find being deeply unfashionable quite groovy (by still using words like 'groovy' for example).

Washington Post
Biting critic of national education policy
Washington Post
He had the analytic skill and academic standing -- including a doctorate in developmental psychology from Stanford University -- to become a leading ...

We often think that pressure on young women to be thin is a modern phenomenon, but a fascinating letter to the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry published in 2000 noted that this is not a new development. The authors cite evidence from Ancient Rome showing a similar cultural pressures were widespread:

Garner et al. (1985) wrote about the present “unprecedented emphasis on thinness and dieting” which is one factor responsible for the increase in anorexic and bulimic disorders. It is generally believed that dieting in pursuit of a thinner shape and slimness as a standard for feminine beauty are modern attitudes. However, a clear account can be found in the ancient comedy Terence’s Eunuchus.

Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) (c. 190–159 BC) was a Roman comic poet. His 6 surviving comedies are Greek in origin but describe the contemporary Roman society. Eunuchus was probably presented in 161 BC. In this comedy, a young man named Chaerea declares his love for a 16-year-old girl whom he depicts as looking different from other girls and he protests against the contemporary emphasis on thinness: “haud similis uirgost uirginum nostrarum quas matres student demissis umeris esse, uincto pectore, ut gracilae sient. si quaest habitior paullo, pugilem esse aiunt, deducunt cibum; tam etsi bonast natura, reddunt curatura iunceam. itaque ergo amantur.” (She is a girl who doesn’t look like the girls of our day whose mothers strive to make them have sloping shoulders, a squeezed chest so that they look slim. If one is a little plumper, they say she is a boxer and they reduce her diet. Though she is well endowed by nature, this treatment makes her as thin as a bulrush. And men love them for that!) Then he describes the girl he loves: “noua figura oris . . . color uerus, corpus solidum et suci plenum” (unusual looks . . . a natural complexion, a plump and firm body, full of vitality). So he opposes vividly the typical thinness of the girls of these times to the blossomed body of the girl he loves.

This Roman pressure on girls to diet to meet the social expectations for thinness represents a clear precedent for the current emphasis on thinness. It is clear that in Ancient Rome, as in today’s society, there were multiple factors related to the development of body image concerns which today are often a precursor to eating disorders. These include cultural pressures to strive to develop and maintain a particular body shape in order to be considered attractive and then valued as a woman. Here, Terence mentions Chaerea’s preference for a plumper girl, while mothers usually wished their daughters to be thinner. Although the media influences that today are critical in influencing images of a perfect body were not present in Ancient Rome, it is clear from this part of the text that pressures concerning appearance existed long before the 20th century.

Link to PubMed entry for letter.

Yesterday's lecture in Linguistics 001 included some discussion of irony, and afterwards, a student asked a good question:

I just wanted to ask something that has been nagging me since your lecture today on Semantics. I was wondering whether irony and sarcasm are universal across all languages, and if so, could we then suppose that it were a selected trait in language–that is, something that we evolved? I have been trying to think whether there is any evolutionary benefit–or even linguistic benefit–to the development of sarcasm and i cannot think of any. On the other hand, if sarcasm and irony are not universal, then are they considered just a cultural phenomenon? If so, how likely is it that so many different cultures could have developed it? has anyone ever tested this by finding a cultural group that does not use sarcasm or irony, shown that group examples of it, and seen whether the group recognized it?

Although cultures stereotypically differ in their affinity for irony, I've never heard or read that any group completely lacked the capacity to produce and understand it.  And for the past three decades, there's been a special reason for this question to matter, because the alleged universality of irony is part of a well-known argument about theories of how people communicate.

First, let's clarify the terminology. For the purposes of this discussion, irony means "A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used", and not  "dissimulation of ignorance as practiced by Socrates in order to confute an adversary". My guess is that Socratic irony is less likely to be a cultural universal — it seems to have caught the attention of Socrates' contemporaries as something new and unexpected — but in any case, this is a different question.

And I want to focus specifically on cases like "Wonderful!" as a response to something unwanted, or "Good job!" as a comment on culpable failure, leaving open the question of whether things in the ironic penumbra — e.g. dramatic irony, "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs" — are the same thing as irony in the more narrow sense.

As for sarcasm, although it's often used to mean something like "irony with an edge",  I'll take it here to mean "A sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt" — thus irony may or may not be sarcastic, and sarcasm may or may not be ironic. I'm pretty sure that sarcasm in this sense is a cultural universal, though the cultural meaning of gibes and taunts can vary quite a bit, from provoking conflict to establishing and maintaining friendship. (See Francisco Gil-White, "Is ethnocentrism adaptive", for some illustrative anecdotes from Central Asia.)

Now for the claim of universality. This line of argument starts with Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, "Irony and the use-mention distinction", in P. Cole (Ed.), Radical Pragmatics, 1981; but I'll quote a version of it from Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, "Relevance Theory", in G. Ward and L. Horn (eds) Handbook of Pragmatics, 2005 [emphasis added]:

In Grice’s framework (and indeed in all rhetorical and pragmatic discussions of irony as a figure of speech before Sperber & Wilson 1981) the treatment of verbal irony parallels the treatments of metaphor and hyperbole. For Grice, irony is an overt violation of the maxim of truthfulness, and differs from metaphor and hyperbole only in the kind of implicature it conveys (metaphor implicates a simile based on what was said, hyperbole implicates a weakening of what was said, and irony implicates the opposite of what was said). Relevance theorists have argued against not only the Gricean analysis of irony but the more general assumption that metaphor, hyperbole and irony should be given parallel treatments.

Grice’s analysis of irony as an overt violation of the maxim of truthfulness is a variant of the classical rhetorical view of irony as literally saying one thing and figuratively meaning the opposite. There are well-known arguments against this view. It is descriptively inadequate because ironical understatements, ironical quotations and ironical allusions cannot be analysed as communicating the opposite of what is literally said. It is theoretically inadequate because saying the opposite of what one means is patently irrational; and on this approach it is hard to explain why verbal irony is universal and appears to arise spontaneously, without being taught or learned (Sperber & Wilson 1981, 1998b; Wilson & Sperber 1992).

Moreover, given the relevance-theoretic analysis of metaphor and hyperbole as varieties of loose use, the parallelism between metaphor, hyperbole and irony cannot be maintained. While it is easy to see how a speaker aiming at optimal relevance might convey her meaning more economically by speaking loosely rather than using a cumbersome literal paraphrase, it is hard to see how a rational speaker could hope to convey her meaning more economically by choosing a word whose encoded meaning is the opposite of the one she intends to convey (or how a hearer using the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure could understand her if she did). Some alternative explanation of irony must be found.

In this post, I'm not going to engage their explanation for why "verbal irony is universal and appears to arise spontaneously, without being taught or learned" — the only point, for now, is the claim of universality.  And I'm also side-stepping their view that "ironical understatements, ironical quotations and ironical allusions" are instances of the same category — they may well be right, but such a broad definition will make it very hard to judge whether a culture lacks verbal irony.

So here's a question for LL readers: Has anyone ever described a culture in which verbal irony, in the narrow sense, does not "arise spontaneously, without being taught or learned"?

Given the fact that Sperber and Wilson's claim has been out there since 1981, without (as far as I know) being challenged, I suspect that there are not any obvious counterexamples. But absence of evidence is not a substitute for evidence of absence, here as always.

I should note that the Sperber-Wilson theory, right or wrong, answers the student's question about the "evolutionary benefit" of verbal irony by claiming that it's a sort of free bonus, a necessary consequence of the general principles that make [our form of] communication possible.  On this theory, irony is not only universal, it's inevitable. It seems to me that Grice's theory of irony has the same property, if we ignore the question of whether it works.

[A list of some earlier LL posts on irony and sarcasm can be found in "Locating the Sarcasm Bump?", 5/29/2005.]

[Update — a commenter asked "Do Pirahã speakers use irony or sarcasm?"  I referred this question to Dan Everett, who answered "yes", with these examples:

Example:

A man catches a little fish.

He gets back to the village.  Another man says "mh. Xítiixisi xoogiái gáihi" 'Wow that's a big fish!'

Another example (actual one I collected):

Q: Do women nurse all animals (after seeing them nurse peccaries, dogs, and monkeys)?

A: Yes, and piranhas. Wait, no, not piranhas.

The second one might be more hyperbole than irony, but I'm not very confident about locating the boundaries. ]

Problems with Google's metadata are a recurrent theme here on Language Log. Now on his blog Stephen Chrisomalis reports a stunning cascade of screw-ups that led to Google Scholar producing the following citation:

Embuggerance, E., and H. Feisty. 2008. The linguistics of laughter. English Today 1, no. 04: 47-47.

New Scientist has an excellent article on how the brain makes sense of time and looks at why certain intense experiences seem to trigger the perception that time has slowed down.

It covers David Eagleman's well-known study where he dropped people 30 metres into a safety net and while falling, asked them to read off numbers that were flashing by too fast for normal perception.

The idea was that if time really did 'slow down', or rather, if the brain became 'over-clocked' and the resolution of time perception genuinely became more fine-grained, the participants could read off some of the digits that they couldn't normally make sense of. As it happened, they couldn't, suggesting that time slowing effect is an illusion and not an effect of the brain going into overdrive.

The piece also has an interesting discussion of how cognitive scientists are using the wagon wheel effect to study time perception in the brain. This is where after a certain speed, spokes on a wheel seem to starting moving backward.

This has been used to work out the brain's 'refresh rate', but it turns out that this is unlikely to be a global process because when looking at two such objects moving at exactly the same rate, only one of them might be subject to the effect.

This suggests that the brain might have many clocks, perhaps each assigned to a different task:

The case for discrete perception is far from closed, however. When Eagleman showed subjects a pair of overlapping patterns, both moving at the same rate, they often saw one pattern reverse independently of the other. "If you were taking frames of the world, then everything would have to reverse at the same time," says Eagleman.

VanRullen has an alternative explanation. The brain processes different objects within the visual field independently of one another, even if they overlap in space, he suggests. So the RPL [right inferior parietal lobe] may well be taking the "snapshots" of the two moving patterns at separate instances - and possibly at slightly different rates - making it plausible that the illusions could happen independently for each object.

This implies that there is not a single "film roll" in the brain, but many separate streams, each recording a separate piece of information. What's more, this way of dealing with incoming information may not apply solely to motion perception. Other brain processes, such as object or sound recognition, might also be processed as discrete packets.

Link to NewSci piece 'Timewarp'.

One of the most famous and most mythologised studies in psychology concerns John Watson's experiment to condition 'Little Albert' to be afraid of a white rat. 'Little Albert' and his mother moved away afterwards and no-one knew what happened to him, leading to one of the most enduring mysteries in psychology. Finally, it seems, his identity has been discovered.

An article in the latest edition of American Psychologist recounts a detective story, led by psychologist Hall Beck, to try and solve the question of what happened to 'Little Albert' after his participation in the famous study.

The experiment itself consisted of showing the infant some live animals, most notably a white rat, and some other assorted objects, to demonstrate he had no pre-existing fear of them.

On several later occasions, when playing happily with the white rat, Watson and his colleague Rosalie Rayner struck a metal bar to frighten the young child. Subsequently, simply seeing the rat was enough to cause Albert to cry and show visible distress - demonstrating the phenomenon of classical conditioning, where something previously neutral can be associated with the responses triggered by something else.

Although accounts vary, Albert may have shown generalisation of his learnt response, so he became distressed at things like rabbits, dogs and furry coats, despite the fact that experimenters never presented these with a frightening noise.

'Little Albert' and his mother moved away from the university, his identity was lost and for years psychologists and historians have wondered what happened to the unwilling star in one of the landmark studies of the 20th century.

The first step was to find out exactly when the experiments took place and then to try and identify Albert's mother from the information given in Watson's original studies.

Careful sifting of financial and residency records put the researchers onto a campus wet nurse called Arvilla Merritte, but there the trail went cold.

There were no others traces of Arvilla Merritte but a search for her maiden name, Arvilla Irons, revealed that her married name was likely fictitious to hide the fact that her baby was illegitimate.

However, Irons' baby was not called Albert, but Douglas, and it wasn't until the Irons family got in touch to send a photo of the baby that the researchers could try and make a physical comparison.

The photos were blurry and they recruited the help of an FBI forensics expert to compare the images. The comparison suggested that the photos were likely of the same person and with the other matching biographical details it seems very likely that Douglas Merritte was indeed 'Little Albert'.

The story has a tragic ending, however, as Douglas Merritte died when only six years old after developing hydrocephalus, a build up of fluid in the brain, possibly due to a meningitis infection.

Beck finishes the article on a melancholy note, reflecting on his own part in the story, Little Albert's short life and his visit to his grave:

As I watched Gary and Helen put flowers on the grave, I recalled a daydream in which I had envisioned showing a puzzled old man Watson’s film of him as a baby. My small fantasy was among the dozens of misconceptions and myths inspired by Douglas.

"The sunbeam’s smile, the zephyr’s breath,
All that it knew from birth to death."

None of the folktales we encountered during our inquiry had a factual basis. There is no evidence that the baby’s mother was “outraged” at her son’s treatment or that Douglas’s phobia proved resistant to extinction. Douglas was never deconditioned, and he was not adopted by a family north of Baltimore.

Nor was he ever an old man. Our search of seven years was longer than the little boy’s life. I laid flowers on the grave of my longtime “companion,” turned, and simultaneously felt a great peace and profound loneliness.

Link to summary of article in American Psychologist.

Baarstad is named new superintendent of schools
Thousand Oaks Acorn
Baarstad has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Pepperdine University, a master's degree in developmental psychology from the University of Denver and a ...

Arizona State University
Master's in psychology joins degree offerings on West campus
Arizona State University
... cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, health psychology, legal psychology, psychophysiology, social psychology, and social neuroscience. ...

Arizona State University
Master's in psychology joins degree offerings on West campus
Arizona State University
... cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, health psychology, legal psychology, psychophysiology, social psychology, and social neuroscience. ...

Social Studies
Globe and Mail
... manner exhibited significantly less automatic positivity with regard to the product,' researchers report in the European Journal of Social Psychology. ...

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In Defense of Permissive Parenting: Why Talking Back May Lead to Smarter Kids
Newsweek
In one of the studies due out early next year in the journal of Developmental Psychology, researchers spent more than a year studying two dozen ...

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Not the news, the nooz.

Joshua Walker (Stanford '05) points me to this wonderful story in the Onion of October 21:

Report: 65% Of All Wildlife Now Used As
Homosexual Subculture Signifier

PALO ALTO, CA—A study released Tuesday by the Stanford University Department of Linguistics revealed that nearly two-thirds of all animal species have been adopted to describe various gay subcultures. "Many know that bears are large hairy gay men, and that otters are homosexuals who are smaller in stature but still hirsute," said Professor Arvid Sabin, lead author of the study, which also clarifies such denotations as wolf, panda bear, dragonfly, starfish, trout, and yeti. "But do they know, for instance, that 'chicken' is used to describe a thin, inexperienced 18- to 29-year-old gay male? Before long, we could see homosexuals referring to one another as pelicans or even Gila monsters." The study concluded that if immediate conservation measures are not taken, all animal species will be exhausted by 2015 and the gay community will have to start dipping into the plant kingdom.

As it happens, I have two gay male friends who are pandas. They're both Canadian, but I don't think that's significant.

I myself am both a penguin and a wool(l)y mammoth.

Related Language Log posting here.