Bio/poetry interface... Oops!

In class yesterday I kinda fell through the language crack. Three lines in an Elizabeth Bishop poem bugged me: "--the frightening gills,/fresh and crisp with blood,/that can cut so badly--" (from "The Fish"), so I spoke up. I said "This really bothers me, because gills are soft. I never heard of gills hurting anybody." Several others piped up to disagree and related their personal injuries. So I shut up, puzzled. On the drive home, I realized what had happened. Gills are soft -- capillary beds enclosed in permeable membrane, the sites of gas exchange between capillary blood and the water. But the gill arches (the gill-bearing structures) are made of cartilage and can indeed be scratchy. I hear the very specific language, and others hear the general reference that would include the gills, gill arches, and gill slits as single thing, "the gills."

That sort of thing is inevitable, the differences in language use. What bugs me ultimately is that I can be so blind to it, just not "get" it right away but only an hour later on the freeway. So I miss the chance to talk about it, to clarify it when I'm still in the group, to not be taken for the idiot who's never poked at a fish. I can be so stubbornly literal sometimes, blindered.