Not from around here.

[mrissa]

Sometimes when reading a book, I have a moment of thinking, "You're not from around here, are you?" It's come up again with men's sizes: Ted Morgan's Reds (about McCarthyism) refers to a man as a "behemoth." The height and weight given? 6'4", 270#. And okay, that's a big man. Not in any sense a small man. But "behemoth"? Come on, Mr. Morgan -- nobody would stare at a guy that size on the street. He's just not bigger than dozens of men you see every day at the grocery store or Bigdale.

And then: click! Oh. Not from around here. Right.

Sigh. Still. I've run across books referring to huge men, giants, really really big, who were six foot two and over two hundred pounds, oh golly!, and it throws me way out of the book. If it's fiction, I don't think you need the numbers; if nonfiction, I don't think you need the adjectives, unless you're clearly talking about how the people of that person's time/place perceived him/her.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

People are getting taller; the average height has increased something like three inches in the 50 years since McCarthy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's why I put in the bit about "unless you're clearly talking about how the people of that person's time/place" etc.

Also, one of my great-grandmothers was 6'2", so there's still a certain degree of "grow 'em big around here."

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing she doesn't come up much in the "you have your X's Y" family discussions in reference to you?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Y = stubbornness

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was thinking the same thing; my generation is nearly all taller than their parents.

And Nero Wolfe is so huge he can only sit comfortably in one custom-built oversize chair in the entire world. He weighs an entire seventh of a ton!

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

These days he'd be roughly average size.

I do like playing with perceptions--where everybody is wiry and slight and five-foot four, six feet two is a giant. But that's history or fantasy and you have to build the work to make it work.

The icon is about perceptions. I had to send to New Zealand for a bit to fit the big mare. Here in cowboy land she's a behemoth. But in a dressage barn she's small average. The little stallion is a nice-sized cuttin' hoss or a large dressage pony. Pick your frame of reference.

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Build the WORLD. Urk. Need More Caffeine.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

But that's history or fantasy and you have to build the work to make it work.

Or it sneaks by you. Porthos, for example, is described as a giant left right and centre, but when his height is actually quoted it's 6'4".

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

As I said to supergee, there's a difference between saying that someone was generally considered large and making it clear that the author thinks of him/her that way.

And, well, Nero Wolfe's author should meet some of my great-uncles.

[ckd]

As Wikipedia notes:

At the time (1934), this was intended to indicate extreme obesity, especially by the use of the word "ton" as the unit of measure. In the 1953 book In the Best Families, Wolfe temporarily returns to "normal" body weight, using the description in that book, by losing about 50 pounds.

When I discovered the Nero Wolfe stories in the 1980s and did the math, I reacted much as you did: "286? Is that all?" And this from Rex Stout, of all the author names....

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

If I recall correctly, Nero Wolfe also slims down in The Black Mountain, in which he returns to Montenegro.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

In addition to mere physical size there, I think that sometimes those words are meant to imply a certain amount of presence as well.

Two of my friends come to mind, one 6'6" and the other 6'8" that I would never have described even as big. They were merely tall. On the other hand, Sgt Jeff "Polar Bear" Bass was only 6'1" and wore his nickname extremely well.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

My husband at just about 6' thinks of himself as small. To me, 6 feet is the Beginning of Tall, so I never understood that until I met a bunch of his college friends.

Of course, I have a skewed perception of it because I'm looking at it from way down here. Still, I'm also a rower. The last time I saw someone who would merit the term behemoth, he had to have been 6'8" or so, and rather wide. Otherwise I tend to notice size more when its in company; talking to a bunch of other rowers whose shoulders were all well above my head, I've sometimes gotten the feeling of being in a forest.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had that feeling in several of my math/physics classes. A very comfortable and happy forest.

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

B is 6'1" (1.83 in metric) and over here (in the Netherlands) that's just slightly taller than average. He thinks of himself, and most other people think of him, as a medium-sized man. We have someone in the choir who is a bit over two meters, and *he* comes over as tall, but perhaps that's also because he's rather a beanpole.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

markgritter's family is all Dutch-American (at least all the biologically related members are), and his dad and uncles are (I believe) 6'5", something six-foot-ish, 6'5", and 6'8". So yah. Not surprised.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

And the Netherlands is really strong in rowing ... see how nicely it all fits together? ;-)

Seriously, though, during my one trip there (Amsterdam and Eindhoven, with short visit to a few other places) the Dutch do strike me as a fairly tall group.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I'm not from there, clearly, because someone who's 6'4 and 270 would absolutely strike me as being in behemoth territory. More so if he weighed more. You've lived in California, you know how weight-conscious and fitness-crazed people are around here. I feel embarrassed sometimes to be sixty pounds overweight, as though I've let the side down.

And then, of course, other times I don't give a shit because it's my body. But still. Ya. That's a really big man to me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

When I lived in California, I could describe markgritter as "the tall blond" and have people immediately pick him out of a crowd. I had to explain to our California friends that I couldn't do that here -- not just because there would be lots of tall blonds, but because many people would not register Mark (six feet even) as tall. Myself among them; for reference in case more people have met him, dd_b registers as a normal-sized man in my brain. Not the small end of normal, certainly, but still quite normal at 6'2".

gaaneden once had someone in California find me by telling them I was tall, slender, and elfin. Uh, oh-for-three, I would have thought, but the person walked right to me. (I am 5'6". I was enough of an early bloomer that other adjectives were generally more immediately relevant than "slender" about my body type, when I was forming ideas about how it would be described. And I've always identified with the Rohirrim, so.)

On the other hand, there are lots of overweight people in the East Bay. I didn't notice a weight/fitness focus at all, when we lived out there. Some of this may be the geek skew of our friends, but even on BART I didn't notice a particular trend. But that may be observer bias: I might have a different response if I was aware of being overweight.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, the big one with descriptions in California vs. here: when we were picking tmseay up from the airport for ConJose, I told him to look for the palest person in the baggage claim, and that would be me. It was. By a lot.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Ha, that I can believe. You are a very pale woman.

You're certainly correct about there being plenty of overweight people here, in the East Bay and elsewhere, but in my experience that's especially true of fandom. I don't mean fans are fatter than average, but I do mean it's not terribly unusual for fans to be of considerable girth, so I take it for granted.

Outside of fandom my friends are rarely more than ten pounds overweight, most of them are between my height (5'5") and my husband's height (6'0"), and pretty much all of them work out. It's true of co-workers and fellow choristers, too: short to medium height and fit.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean in fandom only, though -- I meant in our apartment complexes, at the grocery store, on BART.

But I also ran into a large number of people in the East Bay who were less than 5'5". A really, really large number. I was astonished at how many adult people there were less than roughly my height. There's a reason Jenn could describe me as "tall" at 5'6" and have a waitress in the south part of the East Bay find me.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

In New York City, "Goodman" is stereotypically either Irish or Jewish. (I've had a NYC cop ask me which I was; let's just say I'm a bit darker than the average Irishman.) In this area, it's at least equally likely to be how an immigration official wrote down "Gudmondson" or a similar name.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I think you and I have exchanged comments about this before. I've had that same reaction to descriptions in books--and some are very new books. I'm 5'9-1/2" and have been since I was 16 or 17; my father was 6'4"; my brothers topped out at around 6'3". A man who's 6'2" and 200 lbs. just doesn't seem that big to me.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

And my paternal grandmother, born in 1897, was 5'7" or 8". Not as tall as your 6'2" female ancestor, but pretty darn tall for a woman of that generation.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on that as well. I've had two or three different doctors tell me about Logan's size now and comment in almost exactly the same way, "well, that has to be expected, when children have exceptionally large parents - no offense."

Now, I know Jason and I are not tiny by any stretch of the imagination, but the idea that we would be "exceptionally large" or "very large" or some such variation is still very shocking to me. I see us as average height and overweight. That's hardly the stuff of "exceptional" size, at least in my mind. Where are these tiny people that the rest of the world sees as normal, if Minnesotans (and New Orleanians, and Mississippians, apparently) are so large by comparison??

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

California. Seriously. There were lots of adults shorter than me when we lived in the East Bay. Lots and lots and lots.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Okay, but I still think the roughly seven foot doctor who works on our floor occasionally is tall.

On the other hand, although he was solidly built and not in the slightest bit thin, I'd still hesitate to use many adjectives besides "tall" to describe him, because his presence was very mild - not effacing, just moderate. I couldn't imagine calling him "huge," let alone "a behemoth," because he--well, he just wasn't.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I've run across books referring to huge men, giants, really really big, who were six foot two and over two hundred pounds, oh golly!

I had to add this because it's so close to the numberrs you quoted: "Tim was small for a rower, about 6'2" and under fourteen stone." It's from a lifetime in a race, the autobiography of Matthew Pinsent. (British rower who competed in the pair and the four along with Sir Steven Redgrave. Redgrave is a legend in the sport and Pinsent himself is probably one of the best ever. About 6'6" himself.)