A Different Way Of Thinking
Scott Adams writes the Dilbert comic, which appears in all sorts of newspapers etc. Anyway, I spotted this little gem on his website:
Now I realize I have to change. In the old days I would say, for example, “It’s raining.” In the future I will say, “It is raining right now, right here, outside and not inside. Visually it appears to be a liquid substance that I believe without the benefit of controlled studies to be water. I do not intend this statement to be unpatriotic. I am not proposing that you drink it or roll around in it. The rain is neither good nor bad, except in the cases of recently washed cars, picnics and crops. If I have left anything off the list, the omission is not tantamount to an opinion that said omitted activity deserves to be rained on. This message is not intended to be ironic, sarcastic or arrogant.”
It seems that I am not the only person in the world who feels the need to take everything very literally 
Unfortunately the demise of common sense seems to have had quite an effect very rapidly, and perhaps it’s my own pedanticism (is that a real word? Come on Newman…) that causes me to not only express things like that but pick up on every little possibility to change what someone has said into something that makes no sense at all, and of course pick up every opportunity to point out each possibility not covered by vast generalisations.
I was also told today that, if you speak to an economist, “land” means “any natural resource”. So, not only are ships entirely surrounded by land, but I am breathing land, iron is extracted from land ore, and land is flowing through our streams and rivers. According to Wikipedia, it also incorporates “parts of the electromagnetic spectrum”, so when you have an x-ray you’re being hit with big slabs of land, and my energy efficient landbulbs take about half an hour to reach full land expelling capacity.