Dear Freshman,
This is a short story about the significance of a single word. Just to be clear, I usually don’t try to correct people when they say things like “a mute point” or when they “axe me a question”. I’ll let things slide when people “take it for granite,” “do a 360 on the issue”, “hit up the ATM machine” and I even simplesize for them when someone hurts their “self of steam.” Because, for all “intensive porpoises”, the meaning was conveyed and if I understand what someone is telling me then there’s usually no reason to be rude and correct him. Especially not in front of a group of people. That’s just embarrassing. Besides, who knows when someone is using the term “bottles my mind” ironically?
But sometimes using the correct word is crucial and this story is a reminder to all you freshman to be precise… at least when it counts.
I work for a hot air balloon company and I handle some of the valves that we use in the lift systems. At my job there are a lot of different programs, files, and documents that everyone in our building has access to. 99% of these folders I’ll never have to see or know about, but every so often there are certain files concerning valves, pumps, etc that I’d like to be able to look up. To help me out, one of my co-workers sent me a folder called “handy shortcuts”. It was just a file containing links to the most relevant and useful stuff on the network. A few days later, co-worker number 2 told me that he would send me a different folder called “less handy shortcuts”. That was about 6 months ago.
Just yesterday, co-worker number 2 came over to my office and asked me to look something up; so I opened up “handy shortcuts” and started searching. He stopped me and asked why I wasn’t using his link, “less handy shortcuts”. I stared at him with a look of total confusion for a few seconds. I didn’t have a response and he went on to say that his folder was much better because he had gone through “handy shortcuts” and taken out all the old references that weren’t relevant any more…
I finally understood what was going on and I said, “ohhhh… You mean ‘fewer’ handy shortcuts.” Well, of course, he got mad at me for correcting his grammar, not realizing that the difference between ‘fewer’ and ‘less’ actually influenced my decision NOT to use that folder. The best part was when he said “come on, idiot, you know what I meant.” Really?
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