camwyn: (Megaloceros skull)
[personal profile] camwyn
I was born and raised in New York City. When I wasn't, I was raised in northern New Jersey. I had a city upbringing, basically, or a suburban one; and it was American.

When I read The Mists of Avalon, I was in eighth grade. I remember the part with Arthur having to wear antlers, and to take down a deer with a stone knife. I thought this was fairly impressive, given how fast deer were at fleeing the sight of a human when they wandered through our backyard. It didn't occur to me until much, much later that I was thinking of the wrong kind of deer. It didn't occur to me that they don't have the kind of deer that showed up in our backyard in Britain. Deer meant whitetail deer, as far as I knew, and any other kind had a modifier- mule deer, black-tailed deer, mouse deer, roe deer. The deer of England were... something else again. I'm guessing the ones in the sacred hunt were red deer? I'm pretty sure Bradley would've mentioned spots if they were fallow deer, and I don't think roe deer are especially linked with terms like 'stag', but I don't know. We don't have them in the northeastern United States outside of zoos or farms, so they sort of exist in an abstract mental deer space but don't line up with anything in my mind.

Reindeer weren't the same thing, because reindeer were reindeer. No one ever referred to reindeer as deer. They were reindeer. Although I do remember being terribly disappointed in Rankin-Bass the first time I saw actual reindeer after watching the Rudolph special. I have no idea what the hell those stop-motion deer were supposed to be. Probably whitetails. Because deer, right?

When I was younger than that, much younger, I read The Ugly Duckling. It had pictures. The ducks were... umph. I think they were white, I'm not sure. Maybe mama duck was brown and the babies were yellow. I don't know. What I do know is that for the most part that wasn't really what I thought of when I thought of ducks, because I only ever saw ducks that looked like that on television, or sometimes at children's zoos. Ducks were mallards; green heads and brown bodies for males, brown bodies for females. Mallards were ducks. Other kinds of duck had modifiers: wood duck, Pekin duck, Muscovy duck, Mandarin duck.

Geese. There were geese in stories that took place on farms, in books about farming. Sometimes there were toy sets of farm animals that included geese. They were grey, with orange beaks. Which was fine, but- well. Again, I never saw geese like that. If you asked me what a goose looked like I would draw you a brown body and a black head with a white spot under the jaw, and it would have a long neck, because Canada geese were the geese I saw.

It wasn't like that with cows, although I think the default cow in my mind was a spotted Holstein; the thing is that I lived in a city or a suburb and no one around me had cows, so all cows were the kind I saw on television or in books. If you said 'dairy cow' it was a Holstein, and if you said 'beef cattle' it was a polled Hereford, and if you said 'bull' it was a black Spanish fighting bull.

I didn't have a default fish. If someone just said 'fish' there was a vaguely rounded diamond shape with silvery scales in my mind, but it didn't resemble any actual specific species; I grew up with aquarium fish and a great big book of tropical fish species, and trips to the New York Aquarium, and the occasional fishing trip off Sheepshead Bay (although those were only ever for flounder so for a very long time 'fishing gear' automatically included sinkers and did not include lures in my mind). I had generic fish, an abstracted image of a number of things associated with fishiness, but not a specific default fish.

Not sure what I'm really trying to say here, other than maybe remember that not everyone has the same experience-based mental maps as you do, or possibly some kind of commentary on city upbringing versus rural, although either way I should probably add a dash of American-English-vs-British-English notation. Because, well, deer.


(don't get me started on elk)

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camwyn

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