a collection of observations

[kaberett]

I appear to get on much better with derivative works of the Sherlock Holmes canon than I ever have with the actual, er, canon. So. There's a thing.

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Here is a thing I have been enjoying recently: watching the ways chemists use their hands. (Most of these observations probably also apply to people who work in other types of lab, wet or dry, but I mostly notice them among chemists!)

Here's one of the things: hand use is different when wearing gloves versus ungloved. I keep laughing at myself for this - when wearing wheelchair gloves, I push my glasses up my face, or scratch my face, using the back of my wrist or my forearm. When I'm not wearing gloves I'll use my fingers and thumb and hand - even when, as with my wheelchair gloves, my fingers are bare throughout so are exposed to precisely as much ick when ungloved as when gloved.

Here's another: we tend to sneeze into our elbows when wearing gloves. Any kind of glove.

And another: when pouring loose fine-grained solids, we hold the receptacle steady in one hand, and in the other hand hold the source container at a very slight angle - not enough for things to pour unaided - and with the same hand, tap it gently and regularly to get the solid to flow. (Recently witnessed in the wild when my Lovely Housemate was pouring loose-leaf tea into a steeper.)

***

If you are in a conversation with both me and my mother, and we like you and we are relaxed, languages (vocab and grammatical structures) it is helpful to know include (but probably aren't limited to): English, German (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), French, Latin, Cornish, misc Scandinavian, misc Slavic.

I noticed this the other day when she was supposed to be meeting me in a place. I phoned her to ask where she was; she responded "I arrive, I arrive!" Which... is only helpful if you can map it to the French "j'arrive, j'arrive!", which means not "I am arriving" but "I am on my way." And then on Wednesday we had "ubi est antiquus...", followed on Friday by "quaestio super est...". And, thing is, this is all just part of our normal conversation: she's second-gen, I'm third-gen, we're both native speakers of two languages, and we're from a clan that loves playing with language.

And this in turn leads to: I am going to have one HELL of a time using Dragon Dictate, if I ever get around to it. Whoops my seamless multilingualism.

Comments

[ghoti]

Re: gloves. All of this. I also tend to sneeze into/down my shirt/collar since be-labcoated sleeves and elbows are still a charming source of cross contamination. Elbows are just good hygeine. (Kids here are taught to make a "chicken wing".)

[kaberett]

Yesssss.

[ghoti]

Also realized that I've basically stopped putting pens in my mouth. Both for general bored/thinking nomming and also when I've run out of hands.