Twenty Different Kinds of Wrong

A couple of days ago, I heard something that was wrong with a capital R. And it went something like this:

Woman: Have a good day, lover.

Now, on the surface, this doesn’t seem so bad. Except that she was talking to her son, and said son is about five years old by my estimate.

See what I mean about the wrongness? The wrongocity? The wrongification?

I’m all for nicknames. When I ran an office, I probably could have been sued an average of three times per day simply because I called all of my office staff by fond little nicknames and just couldn’t stop myself. Sunshine, Toots, Chickadee: all of them were fair game. And they called me nicknames, like Goddess of the Database and Oh Captain My Captain. (I didn’t have the heart to tell them that it’s a poem about death; they really did think they were being complimentary.) It was all in good fun. Of course, they might have called me different nicknames when I wasn’t around; I don’t know.

I wonder sometimes how surreal it must be to have me as a boss. I used pull out my comic breakdancing moves to help cheer up my employees when the stress got to them, and then I turned around and taught myself how to diagnose cases of a rare disease because it seemed to me that the manager should know what all of her employees do. I burgeon with contradictions.

Anyway, I call my son a goof-butt when he acts like, well, a goof-butt. But on the other hand, I suggested to Slayer that he stop calling our son “C-Man,” because while his first initial is indeed “C,” the whole thing sounds pretty pervy to me. But calling him “lover”? That squicks me out! And he just nodded like that was normal and told her to have a good day too.

I think I need a brain scrubber.