The Man With the Telepath Hat

I was about to start writing about The Man With the Telepath Hat, which, as I recall, was a "derby," when I realized that hat words are a lot of fun.  I'm not a hat guy.  I'll wear a head covering on very rare occasions, this week's cold spell being one of them.  I have a couple of shape-free contrivances that pull down as far as desired over my cranial unit and prevent, or so I'm told, excessive heat loss.  Various well-meaning people remind me "put on a hat" when I go out in the cold, but I usually ignore them.  My head doesn't feel cold, and any heat loss burns calories, which results either in a desirable decrease in weight, or an equally desirable ability to eat more chocolate to replace the putative weight loss.  Also, if I'm going out for more than a minute or so, I now wear my Bluetooth headphones, which, in effect, reduce the exposure of the pinnae to the atmosphere.  This is good because their circulation is limited, and hence the blood, which also transports thermal energy, cannot replace the lost energy as effectively as it does to less extended organs and surfaces.  I put "heat loss through the head" into Google and immediately came up with a number of very sensible articles that explain both why it's true that you lose a lot, and why it's a "Grandma's tale" and why it matters and why it doesn't matter.  What it doesn't explain is how we got here, in a blogitem entitled "The Man With the Telepath Hat."

So, as I was saying, hat words are a lot of fun.  The "hat" that I wear, when I do, which is rarely, is characterized by its creator as a "woolly 'at," she being British.  Anyone who is willing to knit a hat for me, and somehow incorporate my ham call letters in the fabric is entitled to call it whatever she wishes, and if it has an apostrophe, so be it.  It keeps my 'ead warm in any event, not that it would be cold except under extraordinary circumstances, due to the aforementioned "blood."  "Wooly 'at" is positively descriptive compared to the other hat words that I thought of as I wrote the title.  There's the "derby" of course, but also the "fedora" and "Stetson." 

Not to mention the "sombrero" and the "fez."  And the assortment of "caps," which I'm sure have some subtle generic differentiation from "hats" which I'm too lazy to research.  Perhaps, as with the "baseball cap," their rotation with respect to the support pedestal can be used to convey various attitudes to the observer, in addition to preventing sun glare from affecting the eyes in the back of the head.  Can't do that with a "fez!"  (Or can you?  What do I know about fezes or fezae of fezzim or whatever their goofy plural might be?  Fex?)  And caps can convey status and authority!  The next time you see a person wearing a "Federal Spinach Inspector" cap, you will be sure to give him respect and a wide berth* since we all now know what happens when spinach isn't rigorously inspected.

And then, of course, you have the pious hats—yarmulkes, turbans, kofis, topis, zucchetti, and, I'm sure, many with even more whimsical names.  (Bad news:  God has X-ray vision.)

I swear I didn't plan this!  You can tell from the impromptu photograph—I took the picture myself because nobody else is here right now.  I just remembered that I have my own contribution, purchased a few years ago at a garage sale along with something called a "ficus."  I style this hat the "Eric." 

Eric the Fruit Hat

So anyway, the Telepath Hat was a derby (which is also a "bowler").  I'll tell you about it later.

* Been quite a while since the latest zeugma alert.  Have you caught the others on your own?

NP:  "Walk Like an Egyptian" - The Bangles  (What did pharaohs wear, anyway, sphinx caps?)

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