What are some good examples of Holmesian observations that, while not foolproof, have a good chance of giving you some information about a person? For example: You meet an unknown person.
*Thick callouses on his left hand fingertips suggests that he is a stringed instrument musician.
*He’s using a blackberry phone which suggests that he is employed in business or as a professional (this is not really true anymore).
*Certain tattoos will signify past or present military service.
What are some other good ones?
The SH stories are written in a way to entertain and to keep the story going. While Im certain there are a lot of little rules like this, I think having this level of certitude is a bit silly. A tattoo can mean anything from a hipster to a convict.
Couldn’t he just be a left handed worker. Or he could have diabetic neuropathy and lost sensation in his hands thus forming callouses.
I think it’s easier to make these things up after the fact then trying to have a system in place that can work for everyone. However, you may want to try to look into *cold reading *though. That’s an art form that certainly does try to use the technique.
But today, could you tell who just just got home from there?
In earlier times the attire that a person wore was more likely to define them in a certain class of worker or business owner. They didn’t change clothes, or even bathe, so often as in common now.
Now clothes are not so defining. A ditch digger will come home from work, shower, shave, put on very expensive duds, and go out on the town. Yes, there is still a class factor, but it is not so easy to define a person simply by looking at them.
There are still clues that can tell you something about a person. If I thought you were 40-50 ish but wanted to narrow the age down, I would pull up the sleave on your left shoulder.
If I can see a visible small pox vaccination scar, you are probably 50 or older. Looks like someone shot you in the shoulder with a .45, you are at least 50 years old.
They later realised that the big scab wasn’t needed and later vaccinations produced only a small blister that went away without major scarring.
This depends on where you’re from. A friend of mine, I think he’d be about 35 now, once showed me a very large and elaborate scar on his shoulder from his smallpox vaccination, which he got growing up in Ecuador. Myself, despite being nearly as old, never got a smallpox vaccination at all, in the US.
I’ve played the electric guitar since I was 7 and the calluses are not so pronounced that anyone could tell just by looking. I suppose that calluses from playing a steel-string acoustic would be heavier, but still not something you could tell from a casual glance.
OTOH, I can recognize a smoker by stains on the fingers, and usually the smell, even if no cigarettes are in sight.
Frankly, I think he used a lot of good old-fashioned “jumping to conclusions” and “making unwarranted assumptions.” I haven’t been able to enjoy SH since I read the story in which he "deduces where someone lived because of a little mud on her sleeve, reasoning that she must have sat one side of a coach traveling in a particular direction from a particular town. Even if we agree that was the betting man’s conclusion, it’s still a WAG.
In one of Michael Crichton’s books (The Great Train Robbery?) he spends a few pages talking about Holmes. He contends that it was possible to make those kinds of deductions in that particular time and place because of a highly regimented class system, a large number of people who do physical work (each using different muscles) with distinctive physical items (ink, mud, etc.) Today it would not be possible.
I’m 58, and the last smallpox vaccination I had was 40 years ago. (Had one when I was a baby - had to have a second one before I started college). I was noticing the other day that I have no trace of a smallpox vaccination scar anymore.
I’ve made one or two Holmesian style deductions myself in real life, to pretty good effect (I even started a thread about that once), but more about things in general than about someone’s profession, character traits, etc.
I have no visible vaccination scar despite having four smallpox vaccinations starting in approximately 1962. I don’t know why there were four of them. But I can say that I’ve never had smallpox. Or polio. Or mumps.
That, and how close do you need to get to someone to spot that they have callouses on the fingers of just their left hand? Sitting across a standard Holmesian sitting room just doesn’t seem close enough to me, even with really good eyes.
When a person has boobs on their chest approximately 95% of the time they will have a preference for men. If they do not have boobs, 95% of the time, they will have a preference for women.
I’ve noticed that violin and viola players tend to have a bit of a callous on the left side of their chin/neck/jaw area. Not infallible, but a good clue.
Primo Levi wrote that chemists have a characteristic scar on the palm of their right hand. This is from an injury incurred when they are pushing a pipette through a rubber cork into a beaker, the pipette breaks, and the broken part stabs them in the palm. I think it may have been in “Other People’s Trades”.
I’m not sure how universal this injury is among chemists, but it’s easy to imagine that it’s common, and unusual enough that a chemist could recognise a fellow-chemist if he/she saw it.