Last night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I suddenly thought of men's ties. What are ties for? Most articles of clothing were, I suppose, invented for a reason. We all know, for instance, the point of the original fig-leaves. The leap from fig-leaves to suits--or even, I daresay, jeans and a t-shirt--is really not unforeseeable, inasmuch as they all clearly fulfill the same practical purpose. But why ties? What does a tie do, in fact?

I lay there last night pondering ties, and coming up blank. Suspenders, as we are aware, were invented to prevent the embarrassing event of one's pants falling down. Socks prove to be tactful intermediaries between skin and shoe-leather. I imagine underclothes were created for the same purpose, as well as providing needed warmth once we migrated away from the pleasant climate of the Fertile Crescent. Enter coats, hats and gloves. But a tie cannot conceivably protect the wearer from the intemperate elements of wind and weather.

Corsets were necessary to Elizabethan fashions, which demanded that there be wasp-waisted persons to fit into those wasp-waisted clothes. I have it on good authority that even men wore girdles for this purpose. We may disagree on the medical advisability of forcing ones' vitals out of their proper place in order to accomodate current fashions, but at least we can agree that there was a purpose, however laughable, in the invention of the corset, which has since evolved and adapted itself to more modern uses. I doubt we shall ever agree that a tie was invented to make Man's neck thinner.

Not that I shall be inconsolable if I never find out the purpose of the First Tie, since I have already passed cognitively from my original question to that of how one ties the darn things. I have a rather vague picture in my mind of tying a sort of overhand knot around the thinner end, and tightening it effortlessly with faultless execution into those things that men wear every day that they go into the office. It's a good thing I'm not a man, though, because whenever I've tried it in reality, it flops, and I'm afraid that means that ties will always remain a mystery to me. Which is all right, because I know that men will never be able to handle high-heels.