Are Lobsters Ambidextrous? (31 page)

Dentist Rosanne Derango even admitted that occasionally a doctor will intentionally make a prescription hard to read, such as when the medication is a placebo. (“Sometimes we like to keep a little bit of mystery in what we do!”)

Obviously, there isn’t one single answer to the Frustable at hand, and we’re proud of how well our readers coped with the topic. But will we ever solve the problem? Probably not.

Maybe there is a glimmer of hope. Reader Jim Vibber, who has been in the medical device industry for over fifteen years, reports that the American Medical Association is offering a penmanship improvement course for doctors, “with some kind of incentive to take it.” What kind of incentives could actually lure physicians to take a continuing education class in what all would concede is a less than fascinating subject? Jim answers:

 

I’ve seen physicians do many things for little premiums, including sitting for an hour filling out a survey. They respond to free pens, golf balls, ice cream—the same sort of “junk” that anybody else might.

 

Submitted by Allen Kahn of New York, New York. Thanks also to Carmel Nelson of West Henrietta, New York
.

A complimentary book goes to Bill and Mary Ellen Jelen, of Akron, Ohio, who were the first to propose the “demand-side” theory of physician indecipherability
.

 

FRUSTABLE 2:
Why are salt and pepper the standard condiments on home and restaurant tables? When and where did this custom start?

Readers didn’t get much farther than we did on this subject. Much is known about the history of salt and pepper. Sumerians ate salt-cured meats more than 5,000 years ago. Pepper didn’t spread widely into Western cultures until the sixteenth century; indeed, the search for black pepper was one of the prizes that drove explorers such as Columbus around the world.

Salt has become a dominant condiment in almost every culture, not only for its taste but for its preservative qualities. But pepper had to displace other, more popular spices, such as clove and cinnamon, before it became salt’s main rival as a condiment.

In her fascinating book
The Rituals of Dinner
, Margaret Visser details the elaborate respect with which costly salt was treated by medieval diners. Separate salt “cellars,” often made of precious silver, were placed in front of the lord and

 

perhaps each of the highest ranking diners, as an “object of prestige” an indication of status. When the lord sat at what we call the “head” or the host’s short end of the table, it became customary to place a standing salt [cellar] as a marker, dividing the lord’s intimates grouped at his end of the table from those who were not quite accepted into his inner circle and who sat “below the salt.”

 

We have come a long way from expensive salt dispensers to today’s plastic or glass salt and pepper shakers. Visser remarks that even today, the salt shaker is disdained in many formal dining situations.

Matched salt and pepper shakers did not appear until the nineteenth century. Reader Bill Gerk of Burlingame, California, who attacks Frustables with a ferocity that is somewhere between commendable and obsessive-compulsive, believes that the “custom of having salt and pepper as condiments at our home and restaurant tables began no later than the matched salt and pepper sets that first appeared in the nineteenth century.” He argues that the need for salt is clear, since saltiness is, along with sweetness, bitterness, and sourness, one of the four basic tastes. Pepper just seems to be the appropriate antidote/complementary spice to saltiness. Not a smoking gun answer, perhaps, but the best we can do for now.

 

Submitted by Sara VanderFliet of Cedar Grove, New Jersey. Thanks also to John G. Clark of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Joel Myerson of Helsinki, Finland
.

A complimentary book goes to Bill Gerk of Burlingame, California
.

 

FRUSTABLE 3:
Why don’t people wear hats as much as they used to?

Just as the popularity of the undershirt plummeted when Clark Gable took off his dress shirt in
It Happened One Night
to reveal a bare chest, several readers, as well as many popular press accounts we have encountered, credit Jack Kennedy’s bareheaded appearances with dooming the hat. Steve Campion of Tacoma, Washington, makes this point:

 

When Lincoln sported a beard, nearly every success-minded politician for fifty years grew whiskers. The president created a fashion. Likewise, when the young, thick-haired Kennedy took office, he rarely donned a hat as all his predecessors had done. His topless style killed the hat fashion.

 

Clearly, Kennedy intensified the trend, but the hat was already in decline by 1960.

Most of our readers’ hypotheses fell in two general camps: those that attributed the fall of the hat to changes in fashion and those that traced the demise of the hat to lifestyle changes.

Fashion Theories

 

1.
Hairstyles
. Most readers felt that modern hairstyles aren’t conducive to wearing hats, and haven’t been since the 1950s. Imagine wearing a hat over a beehive. Or Angela Davis wearing a hat over her Afro. Nancy Branson of Safety Harbor, Florida, offers her personal testimony:

 

     Hairstyles today are not as
flat
as before. I wear fluffier bangs that I don’t care to have matted down after I blow-dried them just perfectly. When my hair was all one length, years ago, I
lived
in hats!

 

Several male readers confessed that when they wore hats, their hair was left with “that helmet look” when they took the hat off. Barbara Zygiel of Alexandria, Virginia, notes that the advent of hairspray also enabled women to “keep a hairdo tidy without confining it under a hat.”

Kent State University at Tuscarawas professor Dan Fuller
goes so far as to blame the blow dryer, along with longer hairstyles spearheaded by the Beatles, for hurting hat sales. Fuller points out that although we tend to associate long hair on men with the counterculture, mainstream popular culture figures like Johnny Carson, by the 1970s, were sporting long hair:

 

     To realize the abrupt shift in attitudes, go back and read how Joe Pepitone was ridiculed in the press for being the first professional athlete to bring a blow dryer into the locker room. It was my wife, however, who first articulated for me the truth that no one who has spent twenty bucks for a hair-style and has spent many minutes spraying and blowing it dry wants to crush it down and create what she calls “hat-head.”

 

 

2.
Unisex-androgynous fashion
. Our ever-persistent Bill Gerk argues that many fashionable women today have a “tomboy” look, while many trendy men sport an appearance that once would have been called feminine. Gerk believes that both men and women today want to show off their hair, and that traditional hats, which are clearly demarcated as men’s or women’s apparel, would ruin the androgynous effect.

3.
Informality
. Emil Magovac of Sacramento, California, makes the important point that baseball caps are almost as popular now as fedoras used to be, so we haven’t rejected hats
per se
. Magovac mentions watching old films from baseball games in the first half of this century, “where it seemed as if every male in the crowd was in a suit and tie and wearing a fedora.” Of course, today neither men nor women usually wear hats for formal occasions, even Easter.

4.
Sunglasses
. We never would have thought of this imaginative suggestion from Vicky Peterson of San Jose, California:

 

     Prior to the invention of sunglasses, there were very few solutions to the problem of protecting tender eyes and face from the intense glare of the sun. Hats or bonnets with brims were the more practical answer. We now have sunglasses, which do a better job, don’t get blown off as often, and don’t mess up our hair.

 

 

Lifestyle Theories

We have more sympathy with lifestyle theories.

 

1.
We are now an indoors culture
. Typical of the many readers who emphasized this point was this letter from Judy R. Reis of Bisbee, Arizona:

 

     There no longer is much reason to wear a hat. In the good old days, people didn’t step out of their centrally heated homes into their heated cars and drive to their heated places of work. They lived in poorly heated houses and worked in poorly (or unheated) buildings or outside. And when they traveled, they walked, rode horses, or rode in unheated carriages. Since the head is one of the body’s points of greatest heat transfer, wearing a hat made some sense—indoors and out in the winter, to keep the heat in; outdoors in summer to keep the heat out. Hats once had a practical function, although our unceasing efforts to differentiate between the haves and have-nots eventually turned them into fashion statements as well.

 

Anyone who doubts the practical advantages of hats is advised to visit Chicago in the dead of winter. Somehow, the Windy City’s denizens are able to brush off fashion constraints and cover their heads when the wind kicks up.

2.
More women in the workplace
. Catherine Clay, who works for the State of Florida Department of Citrus and has been a valuable source for us in the past, relates a personal story that indicates that hats may not be welcome at work sites for the ever-increasing number of employed women:

 

     Hats draw attention to the person wearing them, making them stand out in a crowd. Since I like being unique, wearing hats seems only natural. About five years ago, however, my (male) boss told me that I should not wear hats if I wanted to be “accepted” in the South. He said people react negatively to the image of a woman in a hat.
      I don’t really buy that concept, but I’ve abided by his
request during the workday. Perhaps hats don’t really go well in the work place, and more women work today than ever before.

 

Once the critical mass of opinion goes against a fashion, it takes true courage to keep it up. Let’s be honest: How would we react to a coworker who wears a Nehru jacket to work? Or a polyester pants suit? At most jobs, conformity, rather than fashion statements, is rewarded.

3.
Today’s baseball cap, unlike the traditional hat, has become a means of self-expression rather than a signal of one’s occupation or status
. Dan Fuller argues that at one time, a working man’s hat signaled his occupation and was designed for function rather than aesthetics:

 

     Newspaper pressmen wore brimless hats made of newspaper to keep ink and lead out of their hair; mechanics wore brimless cloth caps to protect their hair (they worked out of the sun so they needed no brim); truck drivers, service station attendants, and policemen wore the short billed “officer’s cap,” either with or without the support of internal “points”; cowboys are obvious, but farmers traditionally wore a straw with a medium brim or simply an old dress hat instead of the very wide brim of the Western hat. And so on and on.

 

Dan is currently working on a long, scholarly article about this very Frustable and has interviewed several hundred farmers, construction workers, and outdoorsmen, and his conclusion is that, unlike most of the hats mentioned above, the cap has distinct advantages:

 

     The cap is a clear choice over the hat because it doesn’t come off in the wind. It can be pulled down tightly, and whether on a tractor, a drill rig, or a golf course, you don’t have to worry about chasing down your hat.

 

Plus, the logos on caps are now a way of projecting an individual identity rather than just one’s profession.

4.
The automobile
. As Judy Reis mentioned, the average worker in America used to toil outdoors or take public transportation to reach his or her job. In either case, the worker would be exposed to the elements. Today, the majority of American workers
drive to the job site. Many readers pointed to the automobile as sounding the death knell for hats. Automobiles shielded commuters from the cold, but presented a new problem—a low roof. As Catherine Clay puts it, “Who wants to keep taking a hat on and off?”

You may argue that automobiles were around long before the demise of the hat. True, but they were built differently, as William Debuvitz of Bernardsville, New Jersey, observes:

The modern car has too low a roof to accommodate a hat. But if you look at old photos of earlier cars with drivers (or look at the movie
Bugsy
), you will see that men wore hats when they drove because the car roofs were high enough.

 

We don’t think there is
an
answer to this Frustable, but we think we’ve pretty much covered all the bases.

 

Submitted by Kent Hall of Louisville, Kentucky. Thanks also to Douglas Stangler of Redmond, Washington
.

A complimentary copy goes to Dan Fuller of New Philadelphia, Ohio, in hope that his own article will plumb new depths in the area of disappearing-hat research
.