Hacker News Reader

Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

A pessary is a medical device inserted into the vagina, for further context.

I knew that one. Thanks to sex ed.

Monty Python was my introduction[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ

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

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.

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.

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.

Wonder how much of this is ESL

If the US has so many non-English speakers that it materially affects national literacy statistics, one might wonder how we ended up with an immigration policy that produces a permanent underclass of people who are locked out of meaningful jobs and are entirely outside the protection of the law, due to being in the country illegally.

You don't have to be in the country illegally to not speak English (well). ~14% of the country is foreign-born, of whom about 3/4 are here legally: https://www.ilctr.org/quick-us-immigration-statistics/

Most immigrants are required to have basic English literacy for citizenship, per:

https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-e-chapter...

You don't need to be a citizen to be a legal immigrant however.

I had no idea what a suppository is, but I do recognise pessary. But that's probably because suppository is completely different in Dutch, which is not the case for pessary.

What is the population (responders) sample size? Percentages don't mean much without this.

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.

388

I knew this because of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Package...

If it's the same as the Dutch word "pessarium", I think it's a form of birth control. Got mentioned in sex-ed in school, though obviously not something I (as a man) ever had to use. I guess it makes sense for women to be more familiar with a device that only women ever use.

> 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.

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.

I wonder if it’s the plant kingsfoil is based on in LOTR.

I recognised Verbena as a plant from The Witcher. So it counts as gaming-related for me.

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.

I think the bigger surprise for me is now that the most gender imbalanced words are highly imbalanced, but that more than half of the male ones seem so common place and hardly obscure to me. I imagine women would react the same way to most of the female words.

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.

US Dad of 2. We had a doula for our first child, she was hugely helpful, even in a hospital birth. Highly recommend!

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).

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.)

Oh man, this exact thing but for income brackets would be fascinating.

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.

I am 38 and so much more tired from doing this than I would have if I were ten years younger. Not sure how I could do it if I were ten years older.

I'm in the UK and I'd associate doulas with hippies more than yuppies, might just be me though.

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...

>> 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.

On the one hand, it's funny that you put "wellness" in scare quotes, but on the other hand my wife is into "wellness" and I absolutely get it.

This one wouldn't.

I'm a dad, and I'm familiar will all the words except pepium, ruche, doula, and shemale. I can guess that last one, but I've never heard it before.

BTW, my wife was familiar with all the words except checksum. Now she’s 100%.

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

That's a different Kohl. The english word Kohl means a type of african/middle eastern make-up (Kajal in german).

It might also be a interpreted as a reference to a department store chain that mostly sells clothing - Kohl's.

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.

I always assumed kohl was somehow related to coal. Are you saying it's not?

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.

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.

> There isn't a wikipedia article about jacquard as a fabric, which is a bit odd.

You got me curious, here are the lengths of the Wikipedia articles for the top three words:

Women know better

  - peplum: 886 words (disambiguation is the default)

  - boucle: 187 words

  - rouche: 196 words (disambiguation is the default and leads you to "Gather (knitting)")

Men know better

  - shemale: 1257 words

  - howitzer: 2211 words

  - parsec: 2505 words

Is this the reflection of some sort of gender bias in Wikipedia contributors and editors?

Wikipedia's own article on it states:

> In a 2018 survey covering 12 language versions of Wikipedia and some other Wikimedia Foundation projects, 90% of contributors reported their gender as male, 8.8% as female, and 1% as other.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia

Curiously, peplum, boucle, and rouche were exactly the ones I didn't recognize. (Well, and whipstitch.)

ah, Rouché's theorem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouch%C3%A9%27s_theorem

If you look up "chambray shirt" they'll likely be familiar to you

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

…

France has most (or a significant percentage) of the leading fashion houses and cosmetic brands. So it makes sense.

> 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).

French association with "high class" goes a long ways back, including to when Brittania was under Norman rule in the early 1000s.

Much of the loan words from Old French are considered classier compared to equivalent words from Old english

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_dua...

Exactly. This is most likely the cause.

There are no English words of non-French origin for many of these; it's not a marketing tactic: it's just the only way to denote e.g. boucle fabric or chenille yarn.

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?

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.

But remember, the French have no word for entrepreneur :) [1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisoncoleman/2014/02/14/entrep...

Damn, that's a stupid article - another one - from Forbes. Entrepreneur is a French word, and entreprise is company in French. Jean-Baptiste Say coined the word 250 years ago. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/origin-of-entrep...

For context: She's starting off the article with that obviously false malapropism sometimes attributed to George W. Bush as a springboard to talk about entrepreneurship in France, and it's clear that she is using it as a joke.

Indeed. It's tongue-in-cheek. As an aside, I heard a rumour it was Regan, not Bush who first uttered it. As a second side, I'm not sure it's technically a malapropism.

Also other words relating to those in charge, like "government", "minister" and "crown".

Verbena is a plant... commonly used as a fragrance for lotions and creams.

And here I was thinking I knew one of the "female" words because I recognized verbena. Verbena also means a party in Spanish, so I just assumed it was taken with that meaning in (American) English.

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.

Learned about that in James Burkes Connections! Amazing series if you haven’t seen it.

Everything by James Burke is amazing. He's written a lot of other books in the Connections style

Yeah, I (male) recognized jacquard, but only in the context of the Jacquard loom and superficial awareness that they're programmable textile making machines.

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.

Jacquard looms are still in use and the principle is the same, they’re just constructed with modern materials and the patterns are CNC driven instead of punched cards :)

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.

Yves Delorme make some lovely Jacquard bath sheets.

If you don't blanche at spending $100+ on a single towel. ;)

I knew Jacquard because of Google's textiles/tech project https://atap.google.com/jacquard/

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.

I learned that one from Boards of Canada

https://bocpages.org/wiki/Jacquard_Causeway

https://vimeo.com/69572175

If i remember correctly, the cards used in Jacquard looms were then used for voting tabulation in the 1920s, by a small company called IBM. When computers came around in the early 40s, they were available as a source of input. This is where I first heard of jacquard looms anyway.

It was not, sadly, Jacquard who invented the loom that bears his name; Jacquard found one after the inventor died, made some improvements, and a lot of fabric.

The true inventor's name, Jacques de Vaucanson, is rarely mentioned. He also invented rubber tubing, and the chain drive, and the essential precision machine tools still used in every machine shop, and lately in CNC machines. Important stuff. He invented the rubber tube to use in a mechanical duck that would eat, drink, and crap. His inventions form the core of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, Museum of Arts and Trades, in Paris, not to be missed.

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-...

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...)

The recognition rates in the comment you’re replying to are much higher than the ones in the article.

I recognize all of them. I could recall the meanings of only some.

I remember from another study that "cybernetic" and "taupe" were highly polarized. which direction is an exercise left for the reader :)

"taupe" was a punchline of sorts in a very popular British TV advert back when we had 4 (maybe 3?) channels. So, people of a certain age in UK would all likely know it from that.

Older man here, c'mon, those are all easy.

Any thoughts on why Chrome on Android will offer to "translate" some of the words if highlighted, and "define" for others? Word frequency?

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

I feel like this is cheating a bit. Like peplum.... I had no mental construct of peplum as a thing. So it's not like I just don't know the word. I didn't know that there was even a thing that a word could exist for. The underlying mental conception is the thing that's actually missing.

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.

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/

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.

Same for age role, socioeconomic role, or racial role. I wonder why we only talk about gender roles.

Elaborate?

Gender roles certainly exist. Why wouldn't age roles, socioeconomic roles, or racial roles exist as well?

We have other terms and other words we use when talking about some of those things.

Who said they didn't?

99.5% penis comes with testosterone and resulting male anatomical characteristics. The exception proves the rule.

The comment was about cultural gender roles, not anatomy.

They're the same almost 100% of the time.

Even if you make the distinction, "female" describes sex, not gender. So the acronym "AFAB" is a bit internally contradictory if you remember that it was created in order to underline the distinction. Then again, these days more often I see people denying the existence of sex, and replacing it with gender altogether, so maybe it's not that surprising after all.

> Even if you make the distinction, "female" describes sex, not gender

Sex is a multidimensional spectrum. "Sex" categories are, in fact, genders--social constructs.

Wikipedia[1]:

> Female (symbol: ) is the sex of an organism that produces the large non-motile ova (egg cells), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete during sexual reproduction.

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female>

> Sex is a multidimensional spectrum. "Sex" categories are, in fact, genders--social constructs.

Sex is not a multidimensional spectrum. There are two sexes: male and female, this is statistically observable as a binary. Deviations from this binary are not "third" or "fourth" sexes. It's not a social phenomenon.

The reason why people seem incapable of saying this today, is for political and legal aims (if you can't change legislation that refers to "sex", change what the word means), or a misguided attempt to be progressive.

> Sex is not a multidimensional spectrum.

Sex consists of multiple different traits which have a bimodal, not binary, distribution.

> There are two sexes: male and female,

Those binary sex categories are a social construct layered on top of the multidimensional physical reality.

> Sex consists of multiple different traits which have a bimodal, not binary, distribution.

Sex traits in most cases follow a binary distribution, unless you take something like phenotypical height. In the aggregrate, they also form "sex" which is binary. Differences in sexual traits do not create "third, or fourth" sexes.

> Those binary sex categories are a social construct layered on top of the multidimensional physical reality.

This is an ideological perspective, which is pushed forwards by those who want to change the law around sex, by redefining what sex means.

For example, under the Equality Act 2010 (UK), hospital wards are allowed to keep sex segregated for reasons of privacy and dignity, which to some is unacceptable.

Sex is an observation of a physical reality, not a "social construct". It would have been unremarkable to say this even 5 years ago. The physical reality around sex has not changed, rather the ideology around it has, which is why I'm going to leave this discussion there, as there's no reasoning with that.

> > Sex consists of multiple different traits which have a bimodal, not binary, distribution.

> Sex traits in most cases follow a binary distribution

Which is exactly saying they, in the whole, actually follow a bimodal, rather than binary, distribution.

Sex is a bimodal distribution that is so _extremely_ polar that calling it binary would be more accurate and helpful than bimodal. Calling sex bimodal is in the large misleading, even if correct in the narrow definitional sense.

That multidimensional physical reality is, in turn, layered on top of the binary reality that in adult, diploid mammals, the key chromosome pair is either XX or XY, and that every cell (except the somatic line) in that individual will have the same pair.

The issue is that you are saying that the sexual phenotype is primary, while I claim, on the basis of biology, that the sexual genotype is primary.

You appear to reject the existence of sexual genotype. On what basis?

(Edit: s/haploid/diploid/)

The determination of sex in a biological context is based on chromosomes, hormone levels, and secondary sex characteristics.

For a 101 understanding of biology, by far the most common chromosome possibilities are XX and XY, but XXY is possible, as are mutations in one chromosome that combine pieces of X and Y such that a mix of secondary sex characteristics appear. It's also possible for someone with XX chromosomes to have abnormally high levels of testosterone, or someone with XY chromosomes to have abnormally low levels of testosterone and high levels of estrogen, with results such that a visual inspection would not be able to accurately guess the underlying chromosomes.

Hence, bimodal, not binary.

I agree with you regarding the chromosome possibilities. However, aside from rare mutations and developmental anomalies, mammals are either XX or XY. The exceptions prove the rule, and one doesn’t discard all that evidence just to accommodate minor anomalies which have adequate explanations. If you did, science would make no progress.

Regarding your first paragraph, replace “biological” with “sociological”. Then, that is what has been done traditionally, in the absence of the recent ability to determine sexual genotype by DNA analysis.

The Wikipedia pages on Sex[0] and Phenotypic trait[1] are actually pretty neutral.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotypic_trait

Bimodal still implies that most things fall into one of two categories. Binary implies that they all do. You've basically admitted that the distinction is not binary.

Further, we still don't do DNA analysis on the vast majority of people to determine whether they are biologically male or female, certainly not before making a determination for a birth certificate. Even if we did, there's not one true X chromosome and one true Y chromosome that all XY people have, which a strictly binary interpretation would imply. Genetic crossovers between the two are a natural part of reproduction.

The biology of this is really fascinating, and I think it's both disingenuous and incurious to attempt to reduce all of this to a strictly binary model.

Male and female genotypes don't form a distribution, they are one or the other, modulo very rare transcription errors or mutations (which generally don't survive the first few cell divisions following fertilization).

So, talking about "bimodal" as if they were a combination of two normal distributions is not reflective of objective reality, since neither one is stochastic. There is no normal distribution of male genotype-ness, and no super male chromosome.

All X chromosomes differ from all other X chromosomes, but there are no half-X, half-Y chromosomes.

Because of this, in virtually all cases sex at birth is obvious to a medical practitioner. In questionable cases exhibiting abnormal genitalia we can, these days, do a quick DNA test to decide the matter. Wishful thinking is unnecessary.

And, yes, biology is absolutely fascinating.

> binary reality that in adult, diploid mammals, the key chromosome pair is either XX or XY, and that every cell (except the somatic line) in that individual will have the same pair.

Unless one adopts a different definition of “individual” than the one usually applied to humans, this is wrong (germline chimerism is a thing), and right or wrong it's a weirdly narrow claims, as most cells are in the somatic line, anyway.

> The issue is that you are saying that the sexual phenotype is primary, while I claim, on the basis of biology, that the sexual genotype is primary.

Biology and medicine refer to people with phenotypical traits more associated with maleness despite XX chromosomes as “biologically male” and “XX male” (and those with traits associated more with femaleness despite XY chromosomes as ”biologically female” and “XY female”), and similarly (with variations by karyotype) based on phenotype for individuals with non-(46,XX or 46,XY) karyotypes, so even in the sense of the way biology and medicine bucket people into a forced binary, you are wrong.

And karyotype (which is what you seem to mean when you say “genotype”) still isn't binary even if you view it as “primary”, and actual genotype is even less so.

How is being able to be a specific party in the reproduction process a social construct? Is the categorization of penguins into egg-layers and egg-fertilizers also a social construct?

"AFAB" is an appropriation from literature describing DSDs, where sex was to some extent "assigned" in the case of ambiguity.

Applying it to the population at large is absurd, but has become popular within some social circles.

> Nurse sees a penis on the baby - writes M on the birth certificate

Sex is determined at conception and parents today often know what it is before birth.

> 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.

You only say that because of rigid thinking about what boys and girls are.

When someone says to a boy "stop crying like a girl" he's displaying a rigid definition of what a boy is. Instead of saying that some boys can be very sentimental too, you're saying he's non-base-2. That's no different from the person saying boys shouldn't cry.

>Sex is determined at conception

That's only a part of it. Embryonic development plays a part too.

>and parents today often know what it is before birth.

They don't know for sure. Not even the doctors can determine it 100%. The estimation is done by looking for a penis with ultrasound. Sometimes the estimation isn't correct and the opposite gender is assigned after.

In practice, it’s pretty much synonymous with “biologically female”.

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...)

Seems a bunch are around fabric/garments, I have a minor sewing hobby so I recognized some of them (male)

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.

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.

Midwife

Doulas may or may not have midwife training, they aren't the same thing

https://thewell.northwell.edu/pregnancy/doula-vs-midwife

Thank you, that’s an excellent article!

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.

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).

That's awesome!

Or when you return a suit for some alterations, that would be a tailor recursion.

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.

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.

Leonardo uses ninjatos as of the last time I paid attention to the franchise. Katanas are much longer.

Whatever they look like, they're usually described by TMNT media as katanas. Quite possibly incorrectly, for all I know.

They wrote and spoke of them as katanas, yes. But you're also talking about a series who treated the Sai as a sharp weapon (which is round and a striking and blocking weapon)... though, I don't think they did this in the comic. It's been a while).

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.

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.

"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...

They were also a part of rotating rust drives, which made it very fun to find old ones and pick them apart.

Wait. What will they do to babies?!

If someone swallows more than one, they can pinch together different parts of the intestine or bowl and cause a perforation, which is a serious medical emergency that if untreated will lead to death.

It's dangerous for anyone, but babies and toddlers are most likely to actually swallow them.

It's the only example I know of where swallowing one thing is totally harmless, but swallowing a second one is really seriously dangerous.

> I'd probably answer I knew the word "degauss" but if I had to explain what it physically is, I'd struggle.

It's a button on old monitors.

That's all I know about it. It sounds like it undoes something magnetic-field related, but I have no clue what.

That's pretty much what I'd know about it, too. IIRC its supposed purpose was to fix distortion on CRT displays caused by, uhm, probably something magnetically related. Exactly the level of "knowing" where I'd feel ambivalent.

> I literally knew all of the male words and zero of the female ones (I’m male)/

I find it kind of astounding that someone can know what aileron or azimuth is, but not what a doula is. The former I have never, ever encountered, whereas I feel like doulas come up as a routine topic in culture.

From the Wikipedia article, it seems like doula is of fairly recent American coinage. And the fact that it's comes up as a routine topic probably says more about your social circle than anything else.

> And the fact that it's comes up as a routine topic probably says more about your social circle than anything else.

Not really. Unless my 'social circle' also has a monopoly on metrics like Google Trends, doula is a more popular term than either aileron or azimuth in the majority of countries for which metrics are available.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=do...

The fact the there are more searches for a commercial service compared to technical terms is not indicative of anything.

I googled doula because I don't know what it meant. I don't think I ever googled azimuth or aileron.

I've known what a dually is for six decades, but I never heard of a doula.

I had never heard them called duallies (duallys?) before this millennium. First encountered the word at a drive-thru (-through?) car wash, where they were not allowed, and was left to figure out from context what it must mean.

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.

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.

You were never exposed to Victorian novels.

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.

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.

I think males and females reproduce the same way.

Men don't generally have a doula guiding them through giving birth.

Which has nothing to do with his point.

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.

Males would struggle to make proper use of a pessary.

Is this really the state of sex ed?

Not really... Not when they are the subject of the sentence instead of the direct object.

>The male ones are tech/games/science

A lot of the left half was words I only vaguely knew, and that's because I've seen most of them used in games before. A good chunk just in Final Fantasy XIV alone, but the fabrics and clothing items tend to pop up a fair bit in the sort of item-intensive games that need to reach for words to make this particular shoe sound better.

I know espadrille from… the clothing shop in an anime golf game.

Interesting, I thought a lot of male words are related to games as well.

  aileron/azimuth/strafe: flight games
  bushido/yakuza/katana: martial arts or Japanese games
  howitzer: strategy games
  checksum: downloading games  
  degauss/teraflop: stuff for playing games
  shemale: ...okay maybe not this one...

Aileron, strafe (different meaning), howitzer - would all have come to me from reading WW2 stories or watching black and white movies in the 80s.

Azimuth, space.

Degauss, TVs

Checksum I think probably from Linux installs (around the millennium).

Teraflop, supercomputers.

Shemale ... hmmm, never saw it, but The Crying Game (TV show) I think would be the source for me.

Conclusion, they're not gaming words you're just a gamer?

> Conclusion, they're not gaming words you're just a gamer?

The claim wasn't "originated from video-games" it was "related to games." More broadly, aside from the direct technology terms, most of those are the sort of words that you only encounter in media.

Videogames are a medium that tends to stretch for more words to describe things (as do novels, compared to snappier media like film/music/tv), so it's a very likely point of first exposure for those of us young enough to have grown up with them.

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.

> I think I half recognize jaquard as a fabric or fashion term.

Also one of the forerunners to the modern computer (its a type of automated loom that can be "programmed" using punch cards)

> The male ones are tech/games/science

Science, war and... the last one.

“Shemale”?

> 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.

It’s a type of fabric, not colour.

Chambray is stuff you make a work or gardening shirt out of. Men used to all wear chambray work shirts.

I know that Jaquard is a kind of loom, but I only know that because of an interest in early industrial manufacturing tech

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.

I'm a bit more in the middle. I don't know all of the "male" words, and I do know some of the "female" ones, though I still strongly lean "male". I'll ask my wife what she thinks.

No clue what "peplum" is, I'm afraid.

It's funny, because those words sort of mark "cheesy romance/cheesy sci-fi" stories.

One of the things I was pointed to when learning a foreign language was: "Want to learn more adjectives? Read cheesy romance novels in the language."

A sort of early nearly-robot; it's where punched cards were first used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine

Yeah, male here, I knew only "damask" from the women's list, nearly all from the men's.

I knew some of them but my whole family works/has worked in textiles industry, so biased sample.

same

Reply on news.ycombinator.com