Proudly Pedantic

No one has mastered the fine art of being pedantic quite like me.

I remember a conversation I had with an old friend, D, when I was seventeen. (D ‘Past’, not D ‘Present’) We were lazing about at her house talking about (what else?) guys - who was fine, who was funky, who liked who first and all those very important things.

Then she mentioned that a guy who lived down the road had confided in her that he was helplessly in love with me and that he had never felt that way about any girl before; I was interesting and fun and he was hopelessly in love.

“He’s what?” I asked.

“He’s in love with you!”

“Yes I heard that part” I said, “What I’m asking is – is he helplessly in love, or hopelessly in love?”

“What?” D looked blank.

“First you said he’s helplessly in love, then at the end you said hopelessly. So which one is it? Helpless or hopeless? Be specific.”

First she laughed and said I was crazy or something like that, then when she realised I was serious she looked very irritated. “Does it matter? Whatever it is, he’s in love.”

“It matters…” I explained carefully “…because I’m going to record it in my diary and I need to be accurate. I need to capture his feelings as he declared them.”

She looked at me like I was mad.

The thing is I didn’t believe her to start with. Not the bit about the guy being in love - that might have been true. But D was such a huge fan of frothy romantic novels that she probably made up the bit about helplessness and hopelessness.

So I’m the family pedant who likes to be very clear in conversation. “Say what you mean and mean what you say” and all that.

Anyways, the year I was seventeen was a glorious year. We were young, we had fun, we had crushes on each other and we played loud music. ‘We’ being a group of guys and girls who hung out at my friend D’s place nearly everyday.

(I must digress at this point - what happened to all the guys from my teenage years?? Where the heck did they all go?)

One day one of the guys in the group noticed that my voice sounded a little hoarse.

“You’ve caught a cold?” he asked.

“I don’t know if I have.” I replied.

“But you have a sore throat?”

“Yes I do.”

“Then you’ve caught a cold” he pronounced.

“It’s not a cold yet so I can’t agree.”

“So…the answer is no, you haven’t caught a cold then.”

“Well I don’t know, I may have, it could be that it just hasn’t manifested yet. Can I answer this question tomorrow? Because by then I’ll know whether or not I’ve caught a cold.”

Looking back, I’m really surprised that he stuck around that long to have that sort of silly conversation with me.

Or maybe... he was the guy who was hopelessly, helplessly in love.