This website on the care of llamas provides the following guide to interpreting a llama's mood. It seems to be mostly in the ears, no?
The real-life example below demonstrates that reading llamas' expressions is not as straightforward as the diagram would have you believe. I think I'd categorise the animals below as - smug, imperious, and about to hawk up a loogie.
I try to aim for an alert/curious but at the same time relaxed state myself. I'm not sure what I should be doing with my ears.
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Alert, curious, relaxed: those are all good signals to send, no matter where or in what circumstances. However, and especially in urban living, I'd think the one look that everybody should have down cold is that hawk-up-a-loogie one. So maybe you should work on the flattening of the ears, with a slight upturn to the tips. I predict many hours before a mirror.
Good word, loogie. I just blew (er, so to speak) a precious 15 minutes prowling around on the Web trying to discern its etymology. Interestingly, Wikipedia even has a "disambiguation" page on it, with separate articles both on the lowercase it (well, actually on a less slangy word for the same thing) and the uppercase South Park character. And it verges on the too-much-information level, but the medical term spinnbarkeit -- well, who knew?
I was just talking to my brother a few weeks ago about the Seinfeld "magic loogie" scene, playing on the JFK "magic bullet" debate. (Some conversations linger long afterwards. Bring on the metaphors.)
Anyway, it -- the word and the phrase -- is a good old Americanism. Online dictionaries date it to around 1990 but that seems late to me. (I'm probably thinking of its predecessor, looger.) Is there a British counterpart?
(Trying to keep things on an objective level here -- I know this isn't exactly where you'd hoped this post would lead, and I don't want to turn readers away!)
This post made me laugh out loud--and going to the site itself didn't do much to quell my amusement. I didn't realize that the three faces represented here were the sole expressions common or important enough to need identification, in the world of llama-interpretation. Yes, the ears appear to be the llamas' tell (they would need a hat for poker games). I also might find the illustration more useful if all three expressions portrayed shared an angle. As it is, one has to assume that when alert and curious, a llama's head always points slightly downward and stage right, whereas when relaxed, the animals maintain unbroken (and rather creepy) eye contact.
And I have to ask. Since when is "warning!" a mood? And who is being warned? You, the intrusive biped in danger of being spat on (or eyed to death)? Themselves ("don't fall for the carrot, you remember last time")? Or is it a warning to other llamas, who might otherwise also find themselves facing your penetrating gaze--that psychological scalpel coldly cutting through the facades of persona they have dedicated their lives to preserving and reducing them to quivering masses of emotional vulnerability?
[First attempted comment deleted as a result of 6AM-related typos. (Vanity, thy name is Cedra. Insufficient Proofreading, thy name is also Cedra)]
ps again. For alert/curious and relaxed: one ear up, one ear down. Or possibly a different animal entirely.
I think these days we say loogie in the UK as well, JES. Although I live in such an international community now that it becomes very difficult to keep track of national distinctions in slang.
I suppose the most common British equivalent is - or used to be - gob (which is also, more commonly, used to mean just 'mouth'). I recall a BBC2 satirical skit show of the early 1980s called Not The Nine O'Clock News (it played at 9pm, opposite the main evening news on BBC1, and covered many of the same stories - even featuring mock newsreader segments; it's probably best remembered as Rowan Atkinson's first TV series) which once did a feature called 'Gob of the Month' that rounded up spectacular examples of players spitting on the pitch during soccer matches (in emulation of the Match of the Day football highlights programme's 'Goal of the Month' competition).
Ah, my distant childhood...
1990 definitely seems much too late; it seems to have been around for ages. I mean, if it was used in Seinfeld in the early '90s...
Then again... I wonder with things like this if our memories can be fooled by TV. I mean, for example, if the word had been used in The Wonder Years (I can't remember if it was), would our minds not readily locate it in the vocabulary of the '60s/'70s rather than the '90s?
Where you'd hoped this post would lead...
Ha! You shouldn't hope for anything with blogging.
My prime wish here, in fact, was to cheer up our New York editor friend, who always likes the llama pictures.
Cedra, that was my first thought on the possible ear combination for the mixed state. But then... I started to wonder if they might raise both ears to an angle of say 20 or so degrees above the horizontal. Or if they can bend their ears in the middle, like quizzical eyebrows. (Have you noticed how in Nick Park's animations, Gromit the dog's ears stand in for his missing eyebrows to convey his emotions?)
There's probably an institution of higher learning somewhere that offers a degree course in deciphering llama body language. I mean, if you can study Klingon...
The one in the middle has only one ear?!
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