"Perhaps no single male fashion accessory provokes as much emotion as the bow tie."

"People who wear them fall in and out of love with them or bear them as a burden for life. People who have to look at them can find them irritating or worse. The presence of a bow tie always seems to draw comment and the phrase 'bow tie-wearing' in certain contexts can sound like a slur.... To its devotees the bow tie suggests iconoclasm of an Old World sort, a fusty adherence to a contrarian point of view. The bow tie hints at intellectualism, real or feigned, and sometimes suggests technical acumen, perhaps because it is so hard to tie. Bow ties are worn by magicians, country doctors, lawyers and professors and by people hoping to look like the above. But perhaps most of all, wearing a bow tie is a way of broadcasting an aggressive lack of concern for what other people think.... Another class of bow-tied men is comprised of comedians who wear them ironically, like Mark Russell [and] Pee-wee Herman.... [George] Will said he started wearing a bow tie in the 1960's as a statement 'when things started going crazy.'..."

From a 2005 NYT article by Warren St. John: "A Red Flag That Comes in Many Colors."

1. Much of that article is about Tucker Carlson, who is, like the bow tie, considered annoying. But he doesn't wear a bow tie anymore. 

2. Wikipedia has a long list of bow tie wearers — Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, FDR, "devil-may-care characters portrayed in films by actors like Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra, and — later, to the discredit of the tie — "nerds and geeks, such as... Barney Fife...."

3. I ran into this topic Bob-Dylan-style, that is, by wandering about intuitively. Bob got me listening to an obscure Frank Sinatra song — "Whatever Happened to Christmas" — and then I was reading about Sinatra, mainly because commenter Lurker21 said "Whoever made the video apparently thinks that Christmas went away when Frank left his wife and kids for Ava Gardner" and I needed an answer to the question how long did Frank Sinatra stay with Ava Gardner? At some point, Wikipedia's bio of Sinatra has this: "Such was the bobby-soxer devotion to Sinatra that they were known to write Sinatra's song titles on their clothing, bribe hotel maids for an opportunity to touch his bed, and accost his person in the form of stealing clothing he was wearing, most commonly his bow-tie."

4. Did you ever wear a bow tie? I'm not just talking to the male readers. I'm talking to the female readers too. I graduated from law school in 1981, which seemed to be about the peak of the "Dress For Success" craze. The man's version of the book said not to wear a bow tie unless "you are a clown, a college professor, or a social commentator." But the women's book had us wearing floppy silk bow ties. Here's a 1989 Chicago Tribune article reporting that the magazine Mirabella had marked the death of the ''brief flirtation with laughable dress-for-success suits-and even more laughable floppy bow ties.'' The new approach was, ''a woman flies her own personal flag.''

5. Now, I'm reading about Tucker Carlson. Who were his parents? Was he some kind of rich kid? His mother was an artist, and his father, Dick Carlson, a journalist, "was born the son of college student Richard Boynton and Dorothy Anderson, 18 and 15 years old, respectively. He was born with rickets and mildly bent legs, as Anderson had starved herself to keep the pregnancy a secret. In 1943, Richard Boynton attempted to persuade Dorothy to accompany him in stealing their baby and get[ing] married; when she refused on the grounds that she was a junior in high school and nobody but her parents knew about the baby, he shot and killed himself two blocks from her house." 

6. There are people in this world — perhaps you know one or are one — whose life story inspires them to represent the aborted.