This Mistake Is Gender-Specific

My son Curt called me the other evening to inform me that I had committed another error in that morning’s column.

“Edric Cane is a man,” he said.

I knew what he meant. In a column admitting two previous errors (my quota for the year), I quoted part of a letter from an Edric Cane contesting my argument that one is not likely to come upon an obscene word in a dictionary by chance, since there are at least 200,000 words even in a desk dictionary.

Cane had written: “Just the other day I was checking up on the spelling of my favorite flower, the fuchsia, when my eyes wandered just below and landed on a word labeled as obscene, a word, I must admit, I had never heard before. The definition clearly identified it as a word I do not want next to my dear fuchsia.”

To which I suggested, “If Cane has been so sheltered that she has never heard that word before, my advice to her is not to let her eyes wander when she looks in a dictionary.”

Obviously, if my son was right, and Cane was indeed a man, that she should have been he .

My son gave me Cane’s telephone number and I called him. The voice that answered was precise and cultured, and clearly male. “Edric Cane,” he said, leaving no doubt.

He already knew about my error. A couple of friends had called to kid him about it.

He told me not to worry. “I was just having fun,” he said. “It was a joke. My tongue was in my cheek.”

He said he was French; he used to teach French but is now a money management consultant. Edric is a French name of Saxon origin. He said he had never known anyone else whose name it was. Man or woman.

I still felt guilty. Getting someone’s name or sex wrong in a newspaper is unforgivable. There is little excuse for my mistaking Edric Cane for a woman. Somehow it sounded feminine. It is, in fact, thoroughly masculine. As Cane pointed out, it has Ed in it, and Ric and Eric.

(While I’m down, I might as well admit that I misspelled Ed Lowell’s name as Powell in his story about the Boston bull that wouldn’t lie down when he was told to lay down. This was probably a typographical error, but my record is shot already, so what’s it going to hurt? By the way, I assumed that Ed was a man. I hope he is.)

It was the tone of his note that made me think Cane was a woman. Somehow his obviously passionate love of fuchsias sounded feminine. And I’m afraid I assumed that only a woman could have been shielded all her life from that most common of obscenities, one we both left unspoken.

But it occurs to me that my assumptions were sexist. Why would I assume that only a woman could love fuchsias with such fervor? Why would I assume that only a woman could never have heard that word?

Many men love fuchsias, I’m sure. And many men, I suppose, lead sheltered lives. Not every man is an ex-Marine.

Contemporary thought tends to erase the alleged differences between the abilities, brain power and emotions of men and women. I think of myself as a feminist. Indeed, I am one of woman’s most devoted champions.

But male attitudes are hard to slough off. Some years ago, I was thoroughly chastised for doubting that any woman could ever play third base in pro baseball. I received many letters from women, and some men, extolling the talents of various young women in baseball.

I pointed out that no woman, no matter how good an arm she had, could make the throw from deep third base to first in time to put out a fast base runner. I was hooted down.

OK. I am willing to admit that men can love fuchsias and that men may live their lives without ever having heard that word. But I do not concede that a woman will ever play third base, unless the rules are changed to make the clubs hire women.

I am reminded of the story of the lecture, in Paris, about the differences between men and woman. “In fact,” the speaker concluded, “there is very little difference between men and women.”

To which a member of the audience cried out: “Vive la difference!”

I asked my wife what she thought about my mistaking Edric Cane for a woman. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “He was putting you on.”

Of course, that’s a woman’s opinion.