Of course the title of this thread is about two characters on television who have an incredible ability to read people and pick up information fr4om their surroundings and come up with conclusions that a lot of people don’t really notice.
How many of you have little tricks like that; that they use?
I’ll give an example to start. Here in Georgia (and most other states I presume) automobile license tags expire the birth month of the owner. That fact has proven itself handy as a neat way to guess someone’s birth month in a bar trick type of setting.
The location of calluses on a person’s fingers/hands can tell you things about them. My grandmother, for example, did a lot of handsewing and had a very thick callus on the tip of her right index finger from using a needle and thread for decades, but no calluses on her other fingers. Maybe some shrewd person could suss out another’s job or hobby after a handshake. (“You have calluses on the tips of all your fingers, but none on your palms. Do you play the guitar?”)
That reminds me of a detail I swear I’ve read in a detective story: the presence of a “tailor’s notch” in one of your front teeth, developed after years of biting off thread.
I enjoy observing people, and trying to guess / deduce information from them. Sometimes I can’t resist asking them a question to confirm my speculation. Mostly I do this with service folks like waitstaff at restaurants, but also sometimes with aquaintances like other parents on my son’s ball team. I’m right about 1/3 to 1/2 the time, but the suprise people show makes it fun when I guess right. I always try to frame it in a complimentary way.
Some tricks I’ve used.
-Dealer’s promo tag on a car will tell you what neighborhood / town / city the car was bought in. Much more precise than the license plate.
-The way a person walks, and their posture, can suggest if they have taken dance or martial arts training.
-A person’s vocabulary can suggest a course of study, or work background. Ran into a lot of english majors on a trip to Vancouver, for example (a concierge, a clerk at an electronics store)
-There are medical telltales, but I don’t mentione medical issues out of respect: overweight folks with leg sores are almost always diabetic, for example.
-regarding callouses: in addition to musicians, as already mentioned, I have found people with calouses at the base of the pinkie, ring and middle fingers train with weights, and people with a callous on the inside lateral aspect of the thumb on the dominant hand do a lot of shooting with semi-automatic handguns. Callouses on the finger pads of the index, midddle and ring fingers of the dominant hand would be from a bow string and indicate a person who practices archery.
-sometimes, the intersection of two or more observable demographics in one context can have a very precise association. For example, a person who is:
-young & fit
-has an aussie/kiwi accent
-works in a service industry in western Canada
is almost certainly a snowboard bum working to pay for their lift tickets and accommodations.
