Why Do Pirates Love Parrots?

by David Feldman

  [We were now flush with excitement. She was the first person to give us anything but a verbal shrug. Would we finally get the answer we craved?]

  DoP: As for the first part, I don’t know why we put the tissue in.

  DF: Are you the person who is responsible for deciding whether to put a tissue in?

  DoP: Yes.

  DF: You’re the person responsible for putting in the tissue, and you’re worried about the expense, and you don’t know why you do it?

  DoP: [laughing] That’s a good point.

  Undaunted, we kept plugging away. One vice president at a maker of store-brand socks suggested we contact the Hosiery Technology Center in Hickory, North Carolina (the epicenter not only of the furniture industry, but hosiery manufacturing in the United States). Surely, we thought, at this august center of hosiery education, someone has done a thesis in the intimate relationship between socks and tissue paper. We received an e-mail from the director of the Hosiery Technology Center, Dan St. Louis, who said that he was stumped, but recommended I speak to a true sock guru:

  I would suggest [speaking to] Sam Brookbank, who retired from the hosiery industry with over 60 years in the business. If he doesn’t know, no one does. He is 85 years old and has a mind as sharp as a tack…He is truly a hosiery national treasure. He has forgotten more than I ever will know about hosiery.

  We called Sam immediately and posed our Imponderable, and his first response was the same as everyone else we contacted: an immediate chuckle. He paused for a bit and drawled:

  In my sixty-plus years in the business, I believe this is the first time this subject has ever come up. I don’t know.

  Sam gave us one clue, though. He mentioned that the tissues started popping up in the early 1960s, and definitely were not inserted into socks when he started in the business.

  Still, we were crestfallen. After a few midday cocktails and reading a collection of Emily Dickinson’s most depressing poems, we decided that if the Little Engine That Could could, so could we.

  In desperation, we contacted our pal Gloria McPike Tamlyn, a marketing consultant for the fashion industry. She started calling her friends and before long we had a whole new list of hosiery honchos to hassle. And then one fateful day, we called a man who became our hero, Jeff Stevenson, the creative director for American Essentials, a company that is best known for manufacturing the socks sold under the Calvin Klein and Michael Kors labels. Like everyone else, Stevenson chuckled when he heard the Imponderable, but then he proceeded to discourse on the matter as if he had been thinking about the subject for hours just before we called. But his thoughts could be summarized tersely:

  It’s all about the crinkling. The tissue is only in there for the sound effects it makes.

  Days later, we would talk to our other savior, Larry Khazzam, executive vice president of Echo Lake Industries, Ltd., a company that makes Joseph Abboud and fine private label socks. Larry confirmed that the tissue paper has to be crinkly—he compared the appeal to the “Snap, Crackle, and Pop” of Rice Krispies. Indeed, the paper, which comes to the manufacturers in toilet paper–like rolls, is selected precisely for its high crinkliness quotient.

  Both Stevenson and Khazzam mentioned that the more senses you can bring into play at the store, the more you can engage consumers. With the tissue paper, you don’t influence the visual appeal of the socks, but you can influence the feel and sound. Both felt that the tissue paper added an element of luxury and refinement. Khazzam added that tissue paper is also used in other luxury garments, such as dress shirts and fine sweaters. Upscale dry cleaners sometimes add some, ostensibly to protect clothing, but mostly to impart a sensation of crispness and luxury to the cleaned clothing.

  We confirmed these theories with Richard B. Gualtieri, director of men’s fashion merchandising (and a former men’s furnishings buyer) at New York’s elegant Lord & Taylor department store:

  The tissue in the sock is there as part of the esthetic; to add a sense of luxury to the hosiery. It also adds a bit of thickness to the packaging because better men’s hosiery uses finer fabric yarns, which makes them thinner than the less expensive ones.

  That little piece of tissue doesn’t come cheaply. According to Khazzam, it costs one to two cents per sock if inserted by machine, as it is in the United States, and three to four cents if done by hand, as it is in many foreign plants. So our director of packaging was right about why the tissue is in only one sock of a pair, and often only in one sock in multipacks of two or more pairs.

  As you might have guessed, the choice of which sock is not random. The tissue is always inside the sock on the outside of the package, closest to the consumer, the one that consumers are most likely to fondle before deciding which socks to buy.

  There is a little disagreement among our experts about whether the paper provides any protection for the sock at all. Gualtieri notes that socks are delivered to stores in twelve-pair prepacks, and that the paper in the outer sock helps keep the hosiery from getting wrinkled while in the box. Some fine Italian sock makers put tissue paper in the leg and foot area of the sock, which might provide more support.

  Khazzam was kind enough to do some digging with his European hosiery sources, and they seem to agree with Sam Brookbank that the practice started in the early 1960s, when tissue paper was put into only the finest socks (gauge 22 and 26 socks, which are very thin). Khazzam writes:

  It was started simply as a way of distinguishing the characteristics of the more expensive socks from the rest. What makes a sock more expensive than the next is a function of the desired thickness of the sock, the gauge and the yarn raw material. The reason why the higher gauge socks cost more than the lower gauge is because the initial yarn raw material has to go through more extensive processing; special care must be taken to remove all naps and knots in the raw material; the combing process must be perfect, otherwise the slightest defect would be immediately visible to the consumer.

  So the practice of putting the tissue paper inside these socks differentiated the better socks from the others, and became a standard practice. The advent of the insertion machines has made it much easier to put the tissue paper inside the socks, and therefore the practice has become more indiscriminate.

  As to the origin of this practice, we can only guess that it began in either Italy or in the U.K., which have the oldest history of knitting the finer-gauge socks. I have gone back three generations with this question, but cannot find the exact answer.

  Convinced that we were on the right track, we thought of another common use of tissue paper in an unusual setting. Serious gift wrappers almost always include tissue paper as a component in the final package. When you think about it, if a gift is already encased in a box, which itself is covered by paper wrapping, why is another layer of tissue around the gift necessary? Tissue paper is hardly the most protective covering—surely there is a sock-gift wrap connection. We contacted the king of gift wrap, Hallmark, and we hit pay dirt when Rachel Bolton, a media spokesperson for Hallmark Gold Crown Stores, answered the phone. Just our luck—Rachel has a background in gift wrap and has thought long and hard about the psychology of tissue paper!

  Bolton notes that the earliest gift wrapping was probably wallpaper and tissue paper. Our ancestors saved tissue paper used in gift wrapping and treated it as a precious commodity, as paper was expensive and scarce. Nowadays, most folks toss tissue paper after the gift is opened, but some save it, as Hallmark (and other companies) has added more and more design elements to the mix (some have sprinkles, some have a shiny surfaces, some have printed graphics, and tissue paper comes in almost as many colors as Crayolas).

  Just as with socks, Bolton believes that tissue paper in gift-wrapped packages is appealing because it adds the element of sound (unprompted by us, she used the word “crinkle” to describe the noise). But the tissue paper also adds a patina of elegance. The extra layer adds suspense to the gift-giving process (some folks even torture the recipient by sealing the tissue paper wit
h a sticker, resulting in mandatory extra crinkling). The honoree feels that the gift is special and more valuable, which is also why you see tissue paper included in some sets of fine stationery and chocolates.

  The more Bolton rhapsodized about the process of opening a tissue-paper wrapped gift, the more the image of a striptease occurred to us. If Hallmark sells you as much gift-wrapping product as it would like, the process of opening a gift is not unlike lifting a succession of veils. Bolton believes that adults, unlike some small children, enjoy the slow “tease” of postponing the pleasure of seeing the ultimate gift—they are “into the moment.”

  We’re not so sure that sock purchasers are quite as caught up with their tissue paper interaction, but it has consumed Imponderables for a few months. How cool is it to research a practice that consumers don’t understand and that most of its practitioners don’t, either? Sometimes we love our job.

  Submitted by Donald Montgomery of Atlanta, Georgia. Thanks also to Dan Klinge of Huntington Beach, California; and Carla Fortune of Sweetwater, Texas.

  Updates

  Our Inbox section is full of fans frothing about the mistakes they think we’ve made in our books, but sometimes they help us find new information that screams for an update. Usually, we find a particular new source of information that we’re bursting to share with you. We’ve wanted to include an update section for a long time, and with Why Do Pirates Love Parrots?, we inaugurate the feature. Let us know if you’d like us to continue.

  Why Do Fish Eat Earthworms? Do They Crave Worms or Will Fish Eat Anything That Is Thrust upon Them?

  Appropriately enough, we addressed these burning questions in When Do Fish Sleep? We spoke to many experts, who emphasized that most fish were attracted to live bait that moved in the water. This year, we stumbled onto a 1994 article in The Wall Street Journal about a man who makes a living pondering the taste predilections of fish. Dr. Keith Jones, a biologist, is the director of fish research at Pure Fishing, the world’s largest fishing tackle company. With fish tanks in his laboratory, Jones conducts empirical research on the roles of sight, smell, and sound on aquatic biting proclivities. The Journal article mentioned that Jones tested all sorts of variables: For example, would fish be more attracted to a lure that mimicked the torso of a crayfish without the head, or a head without the body? Jones told the reporter: “We set up behaviorial tests to let the fish make choices…We let the fish design the lure for himself.”

  What really piqued our interest is that the company’s plastic worms were “a quickly growing segment.” Much to our delight, more than ten years later, Dr. Jones is still pursuing his passion at Pure Fishing. When we posed Dr. Jones our Imponderable, we were pleased to find that this Ph.D. is concerned with the important things in life:

  Strange that you should ask me about why fish eat worms, because I have long pondered that same question. Specifically, I’m puzzled by the fact that as terrestrial, not aquatic creatures, worms—at least earthworms—are viewed by fish as food. Worms live in the soil, not water. About the only time they ever make it into the water is when they get accidentally washed down by strong rainwash. Thus, a worm’s presence in the water is not the norm, but novel. Most fish go through their whole lives without ever seeing one. And yet, despite the worm’s novelty, a wide variety of fish not only readily savor the flavor of worm, they attack worms (and soft plastic worm-shaped baits) with fervor.

  We noted in When Do Fish Sleep? that fish, like most animals, tend to prefer prey common to their environment. Jones concurs:

  Predators are generally designed…to successfully feed on their common prey (otherwise, the predator won’t be living long), so it makes sense to me that a bass would attack a minnow even when its their very first minnow encounter. To a degree the bass is neurologically designed or predisposed to attack minnows because bass are phylogenetically fitted to their food…

  About the only reasonable answer I have been able to come up with is that bass (and other piscivorous [fish-eating] fish) somehow mistake worms for long, skinny baitfish. If that’s the case, then one could predict that perhaps bass are not entirely satisfied with their earthworm experience.

  So if Jones’s theory is correct, earthworms are the victims of mistaken identity! He speculates that the earthworm’s shape might be just on the fringe of the shape profile that a bass would attack—and in his tests with artificial worms, he proved that the average worm would be more attractive to a bass if it were shorter and plumper—more fishlike.

  Jones confirms that smell definitely plays a part in attracting a fish. Earthworms

  constantly produce a mucous covering for their skin. The mucous is water soluble and, apparently, has an attractive smell to fish. However, worms become much more attractive when they are pierced with a hook, causing their internal fluids to spill into the water. The same would be true of minnows, insect larvae, etc.

  Pure Fishing (and its competitors) adds scents to their lures. In the past, liquid attractants were applied to the outside of the bait, but these tended to wash off when they were dunked in the water. Now, Pure Fishing also offers baits with scent inside, so that the scent exudes from within.

  Different fish have different skills in detecting prey, and different preferences, too. Catfish, for example, smell like bloodhounds but have lousy vision. Bass see well and don’t rely on their sense of smell, while other fish rely on sound or the vibration in the water. For this reason, Jones and his fellow researchers have worked on creating specific lures for different species.

  So even if earthworms wouldn’t be the first choice of any discerning fish, the humble earthworm retains its appeal to fishermen. There’s always room for bait that’s always available, seriously cheap, and that fish will lunge at, even if it would recoil at the thought of risking its life for a humble worm.

  What Exactly Are We Smelling When We Enjoy the New-Car Smell?

  Do you remember the grand old days of new-car smell that we chronicled in Do Penguins Have Knees? We wrote that the elements of that enticing aroma were paint, primer, plastic and vinyl materials in the car, whatever material constituted the carpeting, trim, and upholstery of the interior, and the adhesives that held them in place.

  Little did we know that only a few years later, Cadillac, a division of General Motors, would be working on a way to assure that every car had a pleasing, uniform smell. Armed with the results of chemistry labs and focus group research, G.M.’s Cadillac division launched Nuance, an aroma designed to appeal to consumers on the fence about whether to spring the extra bucks for its luxury brand.

  In a 2003 New York Times story about how carmakers were engaging all the senses of consumers, G.M.’s James T. Embach remarks: “You pay the extra money for leather, you don’t want to smell like lighter fluid. You want it to smell like a Gucci bag.” The trend is accelerating, with Porsche now introducing its own proprietary scent.

  Meanwhile, the American automobile manufacturers’ biggest rival has been concerned not so much with adding smells as it is with eliminating the ones already there. Recent research indicates that “volatile organic compounds,” the chemicals that leach from the plastics and vinyl found in cars, may be a serious health hazard, at least in the first six months or so of the automobile’s use. The big five Japanese automakers vow to reduce these emissions, even if the end result is a no-car smell.

  Why Do Mosquitoes Seem To Like Some People More Than Others?

  Although citing ambient temperature and visual cues as minor factors, all of the sources we cited in What Are Hyenas Laughing At, Anyway? agreed that mosquitoes were attracted to humans whose fragrance attracted them—sort of the insect equivalent to new-car smell. In early 2005, Rothamsted Research, in Hertfordshire, England, announced that its researchers found that bad smells can drive out good. Some folks are lucky enough to give off more than ten separate chemical compounds, “masking odors,” that either repel mosquitoes or prevent the critters from detecting the human smell that they ordinarily like so
much.

  This research confirms previous research on cattle. By taking individual cows with masking odors away from the herd, scientists found that mosquitoes would flock to the remaining cattle in greater numbers. We’ve known some humans who can clear a room of other humans with their odor, but mosquitoes and humans don’t seem to share the same taste in fragrances.

  Why Do We Wave Polaroid Prints in the Air After They Come Out of the Camera?

  In How Does Aspirin Find a Headache?, we gently chided Polaroid print flappers for continuing a ritual that no longer helped hasten the print’s development. Since we wrote about the futility of print flapping, two important developments have occurred. The world was bombarded with Outkast’s “Hey Ya,” in which Andre 3000 intones the immortal lyrics: “Shake it, shake it like a Polaroid picture, shake it, shake it.”

  And in a stern rebuke to Outkast’s exhortation, Polaroid has taken an official stance against gratuitous shaking. Its online support assures customers that a Polaroid print now dries behind a plastic window—the print itself is never exposed to the air. Indeed, the potential price for excessive flapping of prints is high, just as it can be for excessive shaking of one’s booty: “Rapid movement during development can cause portions of the film to separate prematurely, or can cause ‘blobs’ in the picture.”