Prompt: "Does the act of walking in corduroy pants qualify as human stridulation?"
I confess that I had to look up the term "stridulation" in order to respond to this, so I'll begin by summarizing what I found out. (Where would we be without dictionaries and Wikipedia?)
In short, stridulation is the act of some creature rubbing one part of its body against another part to create an audible sound. Most people are probably familiar with this in terms of chirping crickets, but the phenomenon can be found in a variety of species. The sound created by stridulation can serve a variety of functions, depending on the species, but is often used in attracting mates, threatening foes, or warning away comrades.
Humans don't partake in this. This is not to say there is a complete dearth of self-rubbing activities, but the objective is not to create resonance vibration in any case. The act of walking in corduroy pants does indeed result in sound directly attributable to the rubbing of the wearer's covered thighs against each other, however I would argue against this being classified as stridulation.
First, in all cases from the animal world (based on my limited research), stridulation is the act of rubbing two body parts together directly, not using any external surface to help create or amplify the sound. Human thighseven the ever-popular "thunder thighs"alone do not provide any sort of characteristic sound when rubbed together. One could possibly argue that this is yet another example of humans manipulating their environment to achieve otherwise-impossible results, but this leads me into my second argument, which deals with the motivation of such a deed.
Once, I suppose, corduroy might have been considered a high-end fabric (I can't assert this for certain), which (if that's true) would have signaled the wearer's affluenceand, with it, desirability for a potential mate. In contemporary times, however, it seems to me that the fabric has developed something of a bad repthat is, as a fabric that the affluent would scoff at. So if not to attract a mate, what purpose, then, would a person hope to fulfill by buzzing around in corduroy pants? It isn't very musical. Issuing threats and warnings is common among humans, but is nearly always done vocally or with letters cut from magazines and pasted to a blank sheet. Frankly, the sound of cords seems to me to be simply a marginally distasteful side effect of a particular variety of clothingnot unlike the black marks some sneakers leave on hard floor surfaces.
So no, I wouldn't call walking in corduroy pants "human stridulation". People make all sorts of sounds, but I'm not too inclined to give that term to any of them. For once, let's let the animal kingdom keep something as its own.
In short, stridulation is the act of some creature rubbing one part of its body against another part to create an audible sound. Most people are probably familiar with this in terms of chirping crickets, but the phenomenon can be found in a variety of species. The sound created by stridulation can serve a variety of functions, depending on the species, but is often used in attracting mates, threatening foes, or warning away comrades.
Humans don't partake in this. This is not to say there is a complete dearth of self-rubbing activities, but the objective is not to create resonance vibration in any case. The act of walking in corduroy pants does indeed result in sound directly attributable to the rubbing of the wearer's covered thighs against each other, however I would argue against this being classified as stridulation.
First, in all cases from the animal world (based on my limited research), stridulation is the act of rubbing two body parts together directly, not using any external surface to help create or amplify the sound. Human thighseven the ever-popular "thunder thighs"alone do not provide any sort of characteristic sound when rubbed together. One could possibly argue that this is yet another example of humans manipulating their environment to achieve otherwise-impossible results, but this leads me into my second argument, which deals with the motivation of such a deed.
Once, I suppose, corduroy might have been considered a high-end fabric (I can't assert this for certain), which (if that's true) would have signaled the wearer's affluenceand, with it, desirability for a potential mate. In contemporary times, however, it seems to me that the fabric has developed something of a bad repthat is, as a fabric that the affluent would scoff at. So if not to attract a mate, what purpose, then, would a person hope to fulfill by buzzing around in corduroy pants? It isn't very musical. Issuing threats and warnings is common among humans, but is nearly always done vocally or with letters cut from magazines and pasted to a blank sheet. Frankly, the sound of cords seems to me to be simply a marginally distasteful side effect of a particular variety of clothingnot unlike the black marks some sneakers leave on hard floor surfaces.
So no, I wouldn't call walking in corduroy pants "human stridulation". People make all sorts of sounds, but I'm not too inclined to give that term to any of them. For once, let's let the animal kingdom keep something as its own.