breasticles

The Guy was poking me.

"How are your breasticles?" he asked.

I looked down. "Those aren't breasticles," I said, coldly. "That's boobage. They can't be breasticles. 'icles' are male things. These are female."

"Breasticles," he insisted.

"Boobage," I said, firmly. "'icles' are male."

There was a small silence.

"What about cuticles?" demanded the Guy.

"Cuticles. Cute, see, that's a female thing. So the combination of 'cute' and 'icle's, female and male, it sort of negates gender. That's acceptable."

"And follicles?" the Guy asked, triumphantly.

There was another small silence.

"Women don't have follicles," I said, firmly. "I've decided they don't. I know these things because I'm a woman, which makes me a Subject Matter Expert. You're not, because you're a man."

The Guy started to snuffle. Male mirth. "Breasticles is a perfectly good word. See? You know what it means. You just can't admit it's a perfectly good word from a superior intellect."

Yeah, whatever.

The Guy, whose tenuous grasp of reality leads him to insist that aluminium is a real word, continues to believe that I make stuff up. "You do," he says. "You write down these conversations that don't bear any resemblance to real life."

"I don't. I never make stuff up."

"You do," he insists. "You make up these conversations all the time."

"Name one instance," I challenge him. "One time when I've done that."

There's a silence, usually, and then he scrounges up his single, weak attempt at proof. "You concatenate conversations to make them look like a single conversation," he says. He uses the same conversation every time, having once detected what he views as a fallacy in one transcription and subsequently making that the basis on which he builds an entire world of imagined misrepresentations.

"I've never done that," I retort. "You just thought that I had. There was a very clear demarcation between the two conversations. You just weren't reading carefully."

"You did," he says, weakly. "I know you did. It looked like one conversation."

"It didn't, and I didn't. It should have been obvious to anybody that it was two separate conversations," I tell him.

"Well, it looked like one," he sniffs.

I eye him. "I can't be held responsible for the idiocy of some readers," I said, kindly, and he subsides, defeated.

We've had this self-same conversation, in one form or another, at least three times since we've started dating. Each time, he insists on using the same argument, and retires defeated, only to wipe his spongy, mad-cow brain clean so he can resurrect the same offending example again. This entry is the case in question, and I bring your attention to the phrase, "WHEN I stole it," thus implying a separate occasion. If I had written "WHILE I stole it," it would have implied the same conversation.

I would like to point out that this is from the same guy who ate crow yesterday because he wasn't paying attention during Iron Chef, and insisted on arguing with me about a previous Iron Chef battle; an incident wherein I proved the victor, yet again, because Tivo comes with automatic rewind. All I'm saying is, there's obviously a pattern of imprecise interpretation of media going on there. You can go follow that link and find out for yourselves. If I'm right, feel free to email me with your support.

Men hate to be wrong. It's sad, really. Me, I have no problem with being wrong.

It's just, you know. So rare. . . Posted by yhirata at November 19, 2001 11:43 PM