Writer's Block: Personality Trait = Trouble

What personality trait has gotten you in the most trouble?

Live Journals Writer's Block

Well, I dunno what I'd call it maybe either being overly technical or just knowing how to be a jerk.


Generally, I'm the kind of guy who enjoys technical things -- even in language. One of my favorite things to do is making points about ambiguity, explicitness, and implicitness in speech. In a programming language, there are things that are implicit and things that are explicit. For example, in ANSI C

auto int foo = 1;  /* foo is explicitly of type int(eger) with auto(matic0 storage allocation */
bar = 1;           /* bar is implicitly of type int(eger) with auto(matic) storage allocation */

I believe in the last ISO standard (C99) that they removed that rule from the language standard. But I dunno of any one on earth who would ever write a compiler that didn't default variables to int's other then me of course (my personality :-P). The auto specifier is also an implicit meaning when omited, one which is so implicit that I've seen it only a few times any where in C programs and rightly so.

In Perl, there are often default variables such as $_ that are used implicitly when no explicit resource is specified for an operation, not knowing this you might think perl was bloodly physic when reading Perl scripts!


English on the other hand, is not like that -- there are very few defined rules in the same spirit.


When I actually pay close attention to whats being said (fairly often if my minds unoccupied), I'll often 'abuse' this lack of understanding in peoples English. There are subtle issues where what you say, is not what you meant and there is no defined way for any one to know, other then to know enough in-context about the conversation or the targets of it, to know what the freaking heck you are referring to,


Me, well I often make it a goal to point this out just to piss people off.



This means I have fun but it also ain't good -- my family doesn't like it hahaha. You could say, they are the kind to say things that are openly ambiguous and dislike it when I force the disambiguation by not doing what they *expected* me to do, because I did *exactly* what they *told* me to do instead xD.


Yeah, so I'm a jerk... I have some bones with "Gentleman" written on them but I never said it stopped me from having a good sense of humour about life !(^_^)!



Some times people will ask me a question, and because of how it's worded I'll give them an answer to a different question or a question of my own in return instead of replying to what they expected me to anwser. You could say, it's a sort of "you get an answer for what you asked me about, not what you meant to ask even if I know what that really was" kind of thinking on my part. I usually reserve it for people who I know should know better though hehe.


I generally don't pick on people who don't don't know English perfectly (the language sucks any way), but I do tend to give people that were born speaking it a good twist every now and then lol.