DOILIES & PANTIES -- words of wonder

THERE are a great many things in the world that men simply don't understand, that they can't comprehend, and in fact a multitude of women's words they can barely utter.

After spending the remainder of my entire second week of vacation blogging about silly things like baboons, gonads hanging from trucks and getting drunk on Lake Erie, I am being entirely serious...

When I focus on today's womanly words, doilies and panties. After all, this is Saturday and no one will read this. And I can't get either of these two words out of my head, now that I somehow thought of them.

Let's start with doilies. Doilies, males are led to believe, are decorative things made of fabric that are placed by women upon fine furniture, obstensibly to add their unique features to a home's design.

Their apparent purpose (we did NOT Google this) is to act as protective yet appealing "things" on tables and the like in contemporary living rooms and to save the finish on furniture.

However, males will undoubtedly find that they are never used for anything, really. They just sit there. If you try to put a beer on them, you are scolded. Coffee, same thing. Bowl of peanuts, ditto.

They are a true mystery of femininity. Their sole purpose seems to be to look good and to stop dust from forming underneath them while it continues to accumulate on the rest of the table.

Following are several examples of doilies (ewww), although for the uninitiated, it's important to point out they're kind of like snowflakes.

We couldn't document this, but each one is completely different and allegedly created individually by old ladies in factories on the outskirts of big cities across the planet.

I have no idea where the cute pink one I had downloaded went, it was supposed to be here. Nonetheless, you get the point. (Not the point of the blog, the point about what doilies actually look like).

I have had a life-long aversion to doilies, or at least the word.

and I have absorbed much female teasing about the fact that I find the word "doilies" impossible to say, much less write about. If any doily experts out there would like to comment, feel free to enlighten me. Just don't use the word "doilies."

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Now on to my next feminine word -- and I am limiting myself to only two today -- and that is the word, "panties." Note how, like the word "doilies," it ends in the letters, "ies," which appears to be a prerequisite for women's words.

I do not propose to deal here with any derivatives, descendants or forerunners of what is commonly described in Britain or elsewhere as "women's underpants." Newer forms, such as thongs, will be covered in a future post.

No, I need and want to deal with the word "panties." (Erk). And having grown up with three sisters who left them lying around all over the house in our formative years, this is a difficult experience.

I can accept that women, like men, wear underwear. We call ours, strangely, underwear. Or shorts. Or gauche. Or briefs. (add your description here). Women call theirs "panties."

Why? Of course we have different things going on down there and a few parts which are not quite the same, which I don't have to get into now. But look at the examples below. Why are they so different?

So as to be completely gender-neutral and with sexual orientation equality in mind, you will note that the picture on the right is of a male, in fact, wearing what appear to be "panties."

Believe me, I think there is a genuine need to have women's underthingies be more lacy and sexy and (this part deleted) than men's. But it's the word I can't utter, the thing where I stutter.