People With Big Hands Are Stupid

We have a glove collection.

It consists of a range of mountain-biking gloves we've picked up at various trailheads throughout Canada and Amerika.

They're all different styles and colors, and their condition varies.

All of them are enormous.

This is actually very handy*, as all of the gloves we've bought for ourselves fit properly, which means that it's really difficult to fit polypropylene or woollen gloves underneath them when it's cold. I've worn borrowed gloves with polyprop underneath exclusively since we've been north of Lillooet.

It did start me wondering, though, as I was riding up Williams Lake hills in the rain, in the wake of Barking Spider Scott; Why are people with big hands more forgetful than the rest of us? Are they stupider, or just more forgetful? Either way, why so? Is it because so much of their body's building materials went into making their hands that not enough was left over to form adequate neural pathways? Or is it that there's some communication breakdown between brain and big hands, so the message that should say "Pick up the glove," comes through as "Pick some flowers," instead.

I began to get excited at the possibilities: A life spent riding a wave of research grants, studying the big-handed; Breakthroughs in understanding what's really behind their issues; Tears of gratitude and thankfulness being wiped from eyes by enormous fingers.

And then, disaster. Alternate hypothesis rears its feasible head: The big-handed are no more stupid or forgetful than the rest of us; it's just that most people, upon finding a glove, compare its size to that of their own hands and those of their nearest and dearest, and take only those which will fit them. Enormous gloves, far from being left behind more often, are actually more likely to be left where they lie, as the number of people with hands built to fit them is far less than is the case for sizes S-L, and even XS gloves are probably nabbed by parents seeking to bolster their ever-changing assortment of childrens' items.

Not a damning of the capabilities of the gigantodextrous at all, then; I'll have to find another reason to mislike them.







* = Ha ha ha ha ha handy.