Rivetting

The news hasn't been making me smile much of late, but one of the comments in the online Guardian this morning did make me giggle, as the poster said that Labour and the Tories are so similar that there's not a "hare's breath" between them. I LOVE it when people make sense of things in their own head. The idea that s/he'd heard someone saying a 'hair's breadth' and thought that the breath of a hare would be, of course, so thin as to provide an ideal metaphor for similarity between two items is - if I may be forgiven for being enormously patronising - adorable. I think I may have mentioned before that my friend Eva had a charming interpretation of the lyric in Paula Abdul feat. MC Skat Kat's Opposites Attract which should be rapped, 'Nothing in common with this trust, I'm like minus, she's like a plus - one going up, one coming down but we seem to land on common ground.' Eva thought it was, 'I'm like a miner, she's like a bus,' and using the 'one going up, one coming down' moment, had made perfect sense of it all. On a different level, I used to think that it was some sort of coincidence that British judges were called Justice, and that a lot of ambitious mothers had been trying to determine their child's future by calling them appropriate names to make their CVs more likely to be selected from the pile. I also love the common slip-up 'fine toothcomb' which makes me think of very delicate people refusing to brush their teeth but instead choosing to comb them with a tiny silver implement, a bit like a miniature nit comb but, well, finer.

Much as I enjoy these linguistic nuances, I get the feeling that other people want to stab me in the eyes for my smug know-it-all-ness. And I do understand their irritation. But really, I'm only trying to help. Across the road from my office, the sign outside Bagel Mania has read 'Chilly con carne' for several months. Yesterday, I happened to walk by when a Maniac (surely the employees' name for themselves?) was cleaning the sign, so I thought I'd mention that there was a spelling mistake lower down. She looked at me as if I had just asked if she wanted to drink dog sick. "It's quite funny," I said with jollity, trying to show her that I knew it was all a bit of light-hearted banter. "You've written chilly with a y! That means it's cold! Brrrr!" As I caught myself rubbing my own upper arms in a bad charade, I knew that I must commit suicide for the benefit of society. No one likes a clever dick.

Lesson learned - but only for about 17 hours. This morning, Kate sent me an email saying she was 'rivetted' by something and I replied that it sounded like she was being fastened down with metal pins. I couldn't help myself. And I justified it too: what, I reasoned, would happen if Kate were writing to someone important and made such a terrible gaffe? But then I took a deep breath and reminded myself that no sane person gives two hoots about spelling mistakes, and that most sensible people will surely see my pedanticism as a petty little pseudo-religion which is created to make adherents feel like part of a community, cultivating a failing Other so that they can feel superior to someone. Of course, inevitably, the tiny community is full of petty-minded pseuds with nothing better to do than correct people's spelling and grammar. And I'm one of them. Urgh. I need a new hobby.