The Opinionist

  “I belong to that classification of people known as wives.” According to researchers Sarah Gelman and Meredith Meyer at the University of Michigan, in an article from the National Library of Medicine, categorization is a process spanning all of child development, beginning from as early as 3-4 months of age, until they are able to categorize by language at around age 3. It’s not hard to find examples of this: from the very beginning, the rather boring one offered by Gelman and Meyer is that of an infant separating peas from carrots on her dinner plate; then we have them slowly growing conscious of society-oriented categories like race, gender, and sometimes, class; the more harmless and sometimes very regionally-topical distinctions between March birthdays, summer birthdays, or MSU versus University of Michigan fans; and then in middle school, the YA-media obsession and insistence of lunchroom cliques, the jocks, the nerds, the Plastics, the theater kids; so on, so forth. Categor...

  “You see, while I observe,” is Sherlock Holmes’ haughty catchphrase, touted to many a perplexed Dr. John Watson after his signature bizarre deductions present in each story: a haircut suggesting past service in the military, a tattoo design that hints at an overseas voyage. Sherlock Holmes would be a champion of rhetorically accurate verbs. Literally nothing he deduces is straightforward—and the more outrageous the connection, the more his “genius” reputation is solidified to an awestruck Inspector Lestrade and, in the 2008 BBC show, a Dr. Watson that is officially Over It. As a child first encountering his character, I’ve tried multiple times to replicate his method, staring at people’s clothing, their way of walking, their mannerisms—to no avail. Deborah Tannen’s “There Is No Unmarked Woman” made me revisit this age-old obsession. On the one hand, I agree that society often projects its prejudices onto objective perceptions of people, be they men or women. But, as Sherlock Holm...