Correctness and my wife
I do this really annoying thing when I'm hanging out with my wife. I correct her when she uses the "wrong" words...We're walking around town when we see something out of the ordinary - like a humongous fat dog or a friendly hobo or a police chase.
Her: "That was random"
Me: "It was unexpected. Nothing really random about it."
Her: "Ohhkayyy programmer boy. It was random. Get over it.
Our apartment is in a bit of a ghetto. So we're lying in bed and we can hear another loud argument between the neighbours downstairs. That couple has one of those dramatic relationships and they break out in yelling one night every month or so.
Me: Jodie, why are you so anxious? Get some sleep, gotta wake up early in the morning!
Her: "I can't sleep. I'm worried."
Me: "About what?"
Her: "Lots of abstract things. For example, I'm worried that she'll pull a gun on him, and they'll shoot a bullet through the ceiling, and it will hit me!"
Me: "Huh? That's not going to happen. And if it would, it would totally hit you in the ass and then you'd have a cool story."
Her: "But I'm a worrier. I always worry about abstract things like that."
Me: "That's not abstract. It's imaginary! You're worrying about something very explicit and vivid. An abstract worry might be about say, your happiness or the future. But not getting shot in the ass. That's just imaginary."
Her: "Ohhkayyy programmer boy. It was random. Get over it.
As you can see, I'm clearly getting all caught up in anal-retentive word usage and it drives Jodie crazy. I think it's cause I read code all day and argue with my coworkers whether the method should be named
safeSubstring() or lenientSubstring(). She was surprised to hear that as somebody who uses computer languages all day, I spend a lot of time thinking about words from English.I gotta stop code-reviewing our conversations.
