Stop being so literal!"
Not exactly the stuff of a terrifying war cry, but my parents flung it at me often enough as a kid for it to sound like one. Why? Because I was what they liked to call "precocious," which is a politely backhanded way of saying, "really freakin' annoying." In my case, this manifested as a rather bad habit of correcting everyone. About everything. Unsolicited. Also, my use of the past tense here is inaccurate - I still do it. But now it's more for kicks than it is to be an insufferable smartass. Here's an example of recent text conversation I had with my dad:
Me: "Did you just use the word 'y'all?'" Dad: "Texting affords me subtle creativity" Me: ".........I don't even dignify that with a response" Me: "*won't" Dad: "Too late. Yu already flubbed it" Me: "Well at least I can spell the word 'you'" Dad: "Yes you can thanks to your refined education" Me: "That's not my refined education. That's my kindergarten education."
ZING! I know, right? That was like a 30-megaton sass-bomb right there.
My dad hates it when I do that. My mom, too. And my aunt. And I'm sure a bunch of other people as well, but I'm guessing they don't say much about it because they know that they don't have the same kind of freakish genetic voodoo hold over me.
But my exasperated family may now rejoice because I have a new word for them: "pilkunnussija," which literally translates to "comma f--ker." This delightful idiom comes from Finnish and basically refers to a nitpicker. I'm just hazarding a guess here, but I think the term might have evolved to describe someone who would *cough, cough* copulate with a comma - that is, what we would call a grammar Nazi. In fact, while looking up "pilkunnussija," I came across a link to the website for the Apostrophe Protection Society, whose stated goal is to preserve "the correct use of this currently much-abused punctuation mark in all forms of text written in the English language." No joke. They're even a dot-org - that's legit, man.
Cracked.com - yeah, I know it's not a dictionary, thank you - gives the definition of "pilkunnussija" as: "A person who believes it is their destiny to stamp out all spelling and punctuation mistakes at the cost of popularity, self-esteem and mental well-being." But as hilarious as it is to imagine a gaggle of Daleks rolling around intoning, "EXTERMINATE ... EXTRANEOUS PUNCTUATION," the word need not only apply to grammar fanatics.
A good example? Taylor Doose comes to mind. Between his idolatrous devotion to the minutiae of Stars Hollow's legal code and his insatiable need to tell everyone exactly how they're living their lives incorrectly, I'm surprised Luke never actually snatched that gavel out of Taylor's hand and used it to knock his kneecaps out. Certainly would've given Babette and Miss Patty something new to gossip about.
To those for whom that last paragraph made absolutely no sense, I apologize. (Not really. That was a brilliant example. If I'm sorry for anything, it's that you didn't understand it.) The point is that there are scores of Taylor Dooses out there and, fittingly, scores of words across languages to describe someone so obsessed with meaningless detail as to find fault in everything. Finnish may have "pilkunnussija," but Dutch has "mierenneuker," which means "ant f--ker." German has "korinthenkacker," which means "raisin sh--ter." But the best one - probably because it's not rendered unpronounceable by a tsunami of consonants - is the Japanese phrase "juubako no sumi o hojikuru," which basically means to pick at the corner of your bento box looking for more food.
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Falcon Reese is a junior majoring in sociology. He can be reached at Falcon.Reese@tufts.edu or on Twitter @falconreese.
