Do you know the word peony?

If you do then, according to a survey, you are 96% more likely to be female.

If you’re a man and you know a peony, you’re probably gay, even if you haven’t realised it yet. Or a heterosexual florist.

I know what a peony is because I’m a totally reconstructed post-feminist superman. And because they are Mel’s favourite flower and only come out (not in a gay way) a few weeks a year and our household goes into panic mode in its attempt to buy up the entire national quota.

Half the men thought a peony was a little horse.

Because, according to the results of a word difference gender study, lots of words are very gender specific in use and consequent understanding. Why would a woman need to know what a ‘jock-strap’ is? Other than ‘oh its that thing Jimmy wears on his head when out drinking with his rugby mates’.

The study was on an American onlilne magazine, so that further explains the somewhat neanderthal level of responses. The average Kentucky farmer knows flowers only as things that get in the way of the crops. Though can name every single part of a tractor engine in latin.

Taupe was another interesting word. Is it a wig for men? A disabling disease of the left leg? Something French people eat with grits? A sheet for covering the 58 Chevy that’s sitting in pieces in the driveway?

The word most women didn’t get was solanoid. Which immediately will become the car-part of choice for unscrupulous mechanics telling females ‘ooooh, yer gonna need a new solanoid in there; that’s gonna cost’cha’ when all that’s really needed is a tyre re-inflating.

But heh, Europe is in a crisis. Not the football. England have left the World Cup, Spain are out, lots of others, like Bosnia, kind’of European but nowhere that most people could find on a map of Europe. But I’m talking about real Europe; the Union of European Peoples Who Fucking Hate Each Other. The EU. Who are about to appoint a new ‘leader’, kind of a president for the whole continent… and England. And being a bunch of like-minded democracies, the way to ‘elect’ this new leader is for Germany to announce him, then tell the other countries who he is, and don’t give any alternative, nor appeal, nor votes.

“Ze new leader vill be Jean-Claude Juncker”. Thus proclaimed Angela Merkel and thus the Luxumburger will head up the Union. Cameron hates him, but can do very little about it. Juncker is a federalist, which is awful, and a drunk, which is probably not true but when you’ve exhausted all other possibilities for a reconsideration, start making up personal shit. And ‘drunk’ is a pretty good bet for any European.

Luis Suarez banned for 3 months. Urugauy are appalled, Liverpool are disgusted. And the rest of the world thinks this ‘punishment’ for a serially bad person is pathetically insufficient.

Bite me.

A xxxx