Monday, April 26, 2010

Marginalizing Imprecision



I can't stand when someone describes a location as *only like 10 minutes away* when you know darn well it takes more like 17 minutes to get there. And I'm not talking about some infrequented place. I'm talking about a church, a school, a yoga class, or something else that needs to be arrived at by a PRECISE time. It starts at 9am and there's no way they'd ever leave at 8:50am when they go; so they should know darn well that 10 minutes is a gross underestimation.

My wife provides another example of my exasperation. I'll ask her what time it is, SHE'LL LOOK AT A DIGITAL CLOCK, and say it's *like 8 o'clock*.

Or course it most certainly is not *8 o'clock*. It could be anywhere from 7:49 to 8:15 for all I know. Why can't she just say it's 7:53???

Now she is 100% Italian so this kind of fuzzy articulation is sown into her DNA.

But I witness and suffer this imprecision from all types of Morons.

And I do wonder if it's rooted in the 80s when kids started inserting the word *like* into every single sentence...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you really Joe Biden, living in the Naval Observatory?

Maybe your wife, being 100% Italian, laughs at your concept that any particular digital clock is accurate and/or precise.

Maybe she laughs at your lack of acknowledgement that any human being can communiate precise time to any other human bing.

Then, again, maybe you ARE living in the Naval Observatory and you've calibrated the atomic clock to account for neuro/muscular transmission times in your bodis, shock wave transmission through variable air density and husband dunerhead delay.

Paul Mitchell said...

I like when folks publish their marital squabbles on the interblarqs.

Anonymous said...

C-nut,

Apparently some [like the above two posters] do not know that South and Central Americans, Southern Europeans, etc. experience time differently than Northern American, Northern Europeans and Japanese peoples? i.e. poly-synchronous and mono-synchronous time?

But I digress.. totally with you on the last remark. He's part of the educational mafia, apparently, but this is a pretty cool piece by slam-poet Taylor Mali on today's speaking mannerisms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCNIBV87wV4

-Rich

CaptiousNut said...

Funny clip.

Thanks Rich.