Subject: [Tweeters] subjective terms
Date: Feb 5 13:59:46 2006
From: Guttman,Burton - GuttmanB at evergreen.edu


There are probably a lot of terms used to convey an impression of jizz that are hard to make meaningful except by actually looking at the birds in the field, but terms such as "cute" and "fierce" can be made more objective, I think, just as the ethologist Konrad Lorenz did in 1943. He described what he call the "baby gestalt" with which we adult humans recognize a baby face in contrast to an adult face in mammals and birds; the baby face is "cute" and we react to it in with nurturing actions and feelings; the adult face may not be "fierce," but it is wise to at least be wary of it and to react to it with caution. An adult human may attack you, an adult wolf may turn fierce and bite, in contrast to the likely actions of babies. I don't have the reference to Lorenz's original paper, but you can find a figure showing the idea of the baby gestalt in Eibl-Eibesfeldt's book Ethology. (Yes, there really is a German ethologist named Irena"us Eibl-Eibesfeldt--don't blame me!) Anyway, some of the features of the baby gestalt are:
- a certain softness and roundness of cheek
- a rather large forehead, so the eyes appear below the center line of the head
- large eyes, in contrast to the smaller and perhaps more elliptical eyes of adults (think of the paintings of children with excessively large eyes that are supposed to look especially cute)
- a nose or bill that is small compared to an adult nose or bill
I am nowhere near the gull expertise of some of the folks who've been debating this issue, but I suggest you look closely at some features of gulls such as Glaucous and Iceland to see if you can analyze the impressions of cuteness or fierceness into features of this kind: perhaps the relative size and position of the eye, the size of the bill, and so on.

Let me also disagree mildly with Murray Hansen, who felt that the discussion was beyond the reach of non-experts. I've found it so interesting that I've saved the relevant messages and edited them, and I will be asking permission of all the discussants to let me use this in a publication I hope to tell Tweets about very soon (because I'm going to ask for help from the members of this electronic community).

Burt Guttman
The Evergreen State College
Olympia, WA 98505 guttmanb at evergreen.edu
Home: 7334 Holmes Island Road S. E., Olympia, 98503