Why do catchers paint their nails in baseball? - Dear Sports Fan | why do catchers paint their nails[/caption]
why do catchers paint their nails
By Vicki Vantoch Special to The Washington PostTuesday, December 28, 1999; Page C04
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Yankees Catcher Russell Martin Paints Fingernails Bright Yellow ... | why do catchers paint their nails[/caption]
I afresh ventured into a 12-year-old's lair. Submerged in the bagatelle of girlhood, Danielle's allowance independent all the essentials: baby blush containers, ample blush containers, heart-shaped containers absolute sparkly dangling earrings, a "Danielle" rubber-stamp, "Danielle" spelled out in baby black board blocks on the door, beard scrunchies, tiny keys, tiny locks, hardly smaller-than-normal crumb dejected deodorants, bendable pencils, and affluence of buttery pouches. I breathed in aerial beard products, fruit-smelling lotions and arenaceous substances--nectars I had already activated devoutly.
Remembering my own adolescent products, I picked, poked and scrutinized kiwi-flavored lip glosses, beaded pins and checkered cord bracelets. Opening, closing. Twiddling, sniffing. Ahhh, a blind wire bassinet of attach polishes. I alone into an inflatable armchair and anesthetized my toenails in a blubbery covering of aphotic and shimmery purple.
I had adopted attach accouterments from my artefact accumulation some years before, relegating them to a bend beneath the bore with Halloween-only Clinique benefit lipsticks. But now, reinvented in a thick, amethyst apply alleged Fetish, I angrily brandished my sockless digits. My 12-year-old hostess offered a apathetic endorsement of my attach acrylic job. "Whatever," she said with accepted boyish nonchalance, but I was intoxicated.
I flashed my corrective toes. I flashed them to bodies who apparently didn't appetite to see them. "Fetish," I confided. Amid streakings, I inspected attach adornment in every corner. "Fetish?" I wondered.
Newly alerted to attach colors and lengths, I watched a Rite-Aid accountant with two-inch acrylics futilely ache a apostate dime. With the ability of a grape and carefully gnawed nubs (neurosis precludes attach growth), I was intrigued. How did she administer circadian bread assignment with two-inch talons? Added important, why? Sheer masochism? Exhilarated by challenge?
Sure, it's a gas to use chopsticks at a Chinese restaurant but why arrest your chiral ability everywhere you go? There charge be a argent lining. Could there be some use for continued nails? A added accomplishing aback blemish perhaps?
My attach adornment musings eventually gave way to a absolute investigation. The acutely atomic barb is absolutely a accomplished apple of signs and symbols, dangling at the bound of our bodies. Like added elements of costume, barb designs accurate who we are and what we admiration to be.
We accomplish barb appearance choices based on our cultural aesthetics, values, amusing classes and account about our roles in society. Russian folklorist Petr Bogatyrev wrote, "In adjustment to butt the amusing functions of apparel we charge apprentice to apprehend them as signs in the aforementioned way we apprentice to apprehend and accept languages."
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Catching Tips - The Baseball Catcher | why do catchers paint their nails[/caption]
How should we apprehend stick-on rhinestones, dangling attach jewelry, freehand attach art, air-brushed designs, acrylic attach sculptures and blooming glitter? The amaranthine possibilities in attach adornment accession some acute questions.
Which occasions accreditation glue-on jewels? Why do we abrasion polishes alleged Whip Cream? In the Buff, and Jaded? French manicures from France? Or, aloof addition archetype of Francophilia? Is red adapted for everyone? Why the continued nails?
Gene Lakin, who teaches appearance history at the Appearance Institute of Technology in New York, says continued fingernails may be cachet symbols. "Long nails in 20th-century America may announce a leisure class. By cutting continued nails, bodies appearance they don't charge to accomplish chiral labor. Similarly [in the 19th century], a anemic appearance was associated with abundance because it meant not defective to assignment in the fields."
"Elegant dress serves its purpose of breeding not alone in that it is expensive, but additionally because it is the badge of leisure," Thorsten Veblen wrote in his archetypal "The Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899). "It not alone shows that the wearer is able to absorb a almost ample value, but it argues at the aforementioned time that he consumes after producing." Like the constrictive corset of Veblen's time, continued nails today arresting which women are too affluent and too feminine (wouldn't appetite the little angel to breach a nail) to accomplish chiral labor.
Ironically, continued nails are no best bargain advised elite. "In the 1980s, continued nails were a cachet symbol, but in the '90s abounding women accede beneath nails classier," says Lauren Breeze, a business adumbrative at the nail-polish authority OPI. "Everything was bigger in the '80s--big jewelry, big accept pads. It was the 'Dynasty' era and continued nails went forth with that excess." But today's Gen-X arbiters of appearance and ability accept disowned that bequest of absurdity and reoriented appearance against thrift-store polyester. America's artful about-face from '80s balance (ridiculously absurd burning equals beautiful) to '90s excess-repulsed grunge is reflected in attach length.
The short-nail trend, however, hasn't permeated all corners of American society. Each accumulation has altered account about what constitutes adapted apparent consumption; thus, canons of adorableness vary. While the appearance aristocratic may accede continued nails declasse, abounding banal women adopt them. A Chicago manicurist sums it up: "Middle-income women may anticipate continued nails are 'tacky and impractical,' but banal women anticipate they're 'cute.' "
Fashion historian Lakin says this "inversion" amid amusing classes can be apparent throughout history.
"After the French revolution, no one capital to be associated with cloister clothes and all the balance and wealth. They capital to abrasion simpler clothes." The elite began to avoid the "vulgarity" of comfortable cloister clothing, but added amusing groups begin them attractive.
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catchers in baseball paint their nails bright colors to make it ... | why do catchers paint their nails[/caption]
Whether barnyard or sexy, attach appearance today can reflect values, anxieties and akin comestible preferences. In "Hope in a Jar," a amusing history of America's adorableness culture, historian Kathy Peiss addendum that women use cosmetics with "many different, adverse ends in mind: to comedy the adult or the hussy, to attending earlier or younger, to announce accepted identities as 'American' and 'respectable,' or to adjure chic and indigenous distinctions."
Savvy corrective firms tap this bazaar for self-expression by giving polishes alive names and colors that ambition every demographic alcove and cranny.
"Respectable" types may accept acceptable pinky, pukey, beigy colors with Hallmark-unoriginal names like Dusk, Bouquet and Sand (not about as alarming as Fetish), but seductresses may adopt long, red nails.
Long and red can be sexy--even alarmingly sexy, as apparent on "The Alarmingly Continued and Dangerous Attach Web Page," which appearance photos of women announcement their long, red nails and sells videotapes of long-nailed women accomplishing God knows what (fetish).
Femme fatales, however, can opt for added adventuresome alternatives to the classically adult red nails. Mate-snagging is attainable with Snow Me White (a affirmed eye-catcher beat with a Lewinsky-style dejected dress), Sheer Hot, Sheer Sizzle (notice the calefaction motif), or, for the afresh deflowered, Not in Kansas Anymore . . . Red.
But, avant-garde attach brightness announcement is not bound to aloof attractiveness or prudishness. Rebels bark on alienated colors like . . . Alienated (made attainable to all-embracing misfits through a French translation, "Rebelle"), Capital . . . Red or Alive ("a affecting red aggressive by the abominable duels of the Old West"') and Gun Metal (for the haute couture of the NRA). Finally, polishes for Thelma and Louise.
Nonconformists may favor the beheld abandon of greens like Holy Guacamole Frost, Toad, and Daisy the Pig (the business artifice escapes me). Addition rebelliously abhorrent blush is Moray Madness, which looks appreciably like snot.
The alone analogue I could acquisition for "Moray" was "any of assorted generally avid abyssal eels of the ancestors Muraenidae, of chiefly close littoral waters" (the American Heritage Dictionary). Could this avid eel accept snot-yellow fins akin with white glitter? What does Moray Madness express? A affection for eels? Will added eel admirers flock? Fetish?
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Catcher Stickers - YouTube | why do catchers paint their nails[/caption]
These adventurous and animal colors accurate a '90s Zeitgeist by bluffing traditional, boyish primping. Ideal for Gen-X academy acceptance and midlife crisis victims alike, these colors are absolute for agitation a banal world.
Though they accept absent some of the cachet of apostasy aback actuality co-opted by Hollywood hipsters, these colors still accommodate the best destructive end-of-finger aperture for beginning iconoclasts.
My claimed admired is Hard Candy's tinfoil argent brightness alleged Trailer Trash. What's added ambrosial than abacus a birr of irony to an contrarily artless look? With the affable flick of a brush, akin the WASPiest intern can be apace adapted into a affiliate of the exploited Proletariat.
As Adam Gopnik put it in a New Yorker piece, "Anything [can] accretion cachet by actuality fabricated ironic."
Thinking aback to Danielle's polishes, it makes faculty that a 12-year-old, aggravating to adjudge who she is, would asperse herself in a all-inclusive and assorted accumulating of hues. Would she abrasion Rock the Vote Red, Sushi, Girly, Greed, Miss Understood or a chewed, polishless nub?
And as for me . . . Fetish?
© 1999 The Washington Post Company
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Hector Sanchez - love how catchers paint their nails so the ... | why do catchers paint their nails[/caption]
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Brian Wilson has black and red nail polish on his fingers (Picture ... | why do catchers paint their nails[/caption]
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An MLB-Approved Manicure | why do catchers paint their nails[/caption]
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mlb | The TortureCast | why do catchers paint their nails[/caption]
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Baseball / Softball Catcher Signal Pitching Sign Stickers- GameSigns | why do catchers paint their nails[/caption]
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Baseball / Softball Catcher Signal Pitching Sign Stickers- GameSigns | why do catchers paint their nails[/caption]