All my working life I’ve been active in a field where something is either right, or it’s wrong. There can be many, many different ways that a system can work incorrectly. For instance, the power supply can fail, there can be blue screens, or there can be a divide-by-zero exception in the code. But when you look at the the attributes that go into making a system as nearly correct as possible, the possible configurations are far fewer. A correct system solves a problem in a way that is useful for the people it is designed for, and it does so in a way that properly engineers conflicting quality attributes to achieve the right balance.
This tends to bleed over into my non-professional life. In the course of helping a friend work out a personal budget, I pointed out that the average month has 4.3 weeks, not 4.0, and he got in a snit about being corrected. Yes, it does matter. If you are paid by the month and want to figure out how much you can spend per week, then you have to allow for that 0.3 week. Otherwise you will be having Cheetos for lunch a few days each month. If you tell me all rivers flow north or south–and I have been told this–I’m going to correct you. If you tell me the sun revolves around the earth, I will correct you.
What I will not correct you on: That the Earth was created in six days. It’s your religious belief, and something which is probably very dear to you and your entire philosophy. It’s not worth the effort to try to change your mind.
That gangsta rap is the best music ever. Taste is taste, and cannot be corrected.
Well, I told you it would be mild. That’s all, please carry on.
I can sort of see where you’re coming from, but the reality is that going around “correcting” people on trivial stuff in a general context tends to get you labelled as a “dickhead” fairly quickly.
It’s annoying when you are right and the other person isn’t, but IMHO it’s not usually worth correcting them unless they’re a good friend or someone paying you for your expertise.
I think what’s really frustrating is when people correct you on things that don’t matter. I agree that we should correct people on what they might think are niggling little details, but actually are pertinent, but I want to draw a distinction between making sure people are aware of a detail they may have dismissed as insignificant, and being a know-it-all.
Your example about the weeks in a year is one that I have a personal fondness for, because I came across it a lot when I worked in HR. If you want to, say, calculate how much you paid for your benefits last year, you don’t go, “Well, I get paid twice a month, so I’ll add up my monthly payments and multiply it by 12.” Do so, and you will be incorrect. We pay bi-weekly, so look at a single bi-weekly interval, and multiply by 26.
We get into nitpicky knowitallery when the details you’re correcting are truly irrelevant to the overall point. An example: At work, we were discussing a deal which included shit tons of paper work and legal crap. In our (seemingly endless!) discussions, I at one point focused on a specific clause within a certain document, which contained some pretty serious wording that we would have to address. Well I apparently made the fatal error of referring to the document by an ever-so-slightly wrong name. Not a name that could potentially confuse it with another document, mind you and I didn’t misrepresent some “small” detail of the wording, but still not by the exactly correct name. Everyone knew what we were talking about, I very specfically and clearly was discussing the language, and how it would affect how we proceeded, and yet someone still corrected me on the document name. Who gives a shit? The rest of the world addressed the language which is what actually mattered, and she got her internal brownie points for correcting me on the least relevant thing possible.
You just seem like an ass when you do stuff like that.
Or, for an example we can all relate to, summarily dismissing an argument because there is a spelling or punctuation error. Gods know if you mix up “your” and “you’re,” you’re argument is completely invalid.
The OP sounds totally reasonable and I see where s/he is coming from. Being corrected regarding something factual is taken, by some people, as a personal affront. They’re usually the types who think reading a blog about a subject is akin to earning a master’s degree, or that teachers should give shapes instead of letter grades.
It took me until I was about 35 to figure out how to keep my mouth shut. Things have gone much more smoothly for me since then. Correcting details is fine, but when done as an interruption it’s just dickish. I learned after many years to just wait it out and if it’s still relevant by the time I talk, then I’ll mention it. Much of the time it’s no longer relevant and really, really just isn’t worth the time.
One of the great things about actually having a Master’s degree is that people don’t generally correct you (at least not on the internet, anyway), since they figure you’re probably right in the first place.
The thing is, there’s a Polite Way and a Dick Way to correct someone regarding factual errors. Bluntly saying something that equates to WRONG! is the Dick Way. Casually working it into conversation in such as way as to imply that the thing being corrected isn’t common knowledge and the only reason you know it is because of years of esoteric interest/study in the subject is the Polite Way, IMHO.
After years of being a dick head, I now do that very consciously.
“You know, I just learned the other day from a customer that…”
“Yes, that is confusing, I still need to look that up.”
“Thats interesting, I’ve heard other people say that…”
“Yes, there are a lot of choices aren’t there. It can be a little overwhelming”
“Here it is down here, it’s hard to see things on the bottom shelf”
And I have a three strikes rule. I’ll politely suggest that what you are saying may not quite be accurate twice. After the third time I figure that appearing correct, or saving face is more important to you than hearing a different view.
So yes, a pint in England is not 20 oz it is 16 oz just like in the US, dollars are worth more than the Euro, yards are longer than a meter, and so on.
I’m also a fan of picking my correction battles. If my friend was doing all kinds of work with this spreadsheet that was based on an incorrect fact, I’d correct him (probably humourously) before he wasted too much time on it. When I discovered that the people I had started working with at a temp job had erroneous ideas about things, I said my piece then dropped it - they aren’t paying me to be a know-it-all there.
My parents taught me all about correcting others but not in a good way. One of them will recount some story, that could possibly be interesting, if the other would only refrain from butting in with pointless corrections that add nothing to the story.
So I rarely correct people, unless I believe that what they have said will cause them to look stupid before people less forgiving than me. If people get my name wrong I don’t point it out. I figure if we continue to deal with one another they will work out my correct name. If we don’t meet again why bother making them feel foolish this time?
Feel free to edit it to “One of the great things about actually having a Master’s degree is that people don’t generally correct you, since they figure you’re probably right in the first place.”
I didn’t actually think I was that quotable, FWIW.
And despite me having been to England several times, and my mother being English, and having English cookbooks, and having an English pint beer glass, and it being easy to look up, someone acted like I was a moron when I said that. I politely corrected him twice and then left him to ruin his recipes to his heart’s content.
Not correcting people is something I’m actively working on in my personal life. It drives me up the wall when people are spouting off incorrect facts or mis-pronouncing things, but when I look back and think about it, I realize how many people have said things like “do you have to be right about everything?” or “knock it off” or something else along those lines. The big problem is, when I correct someone about something important, they roll there eyes at me at ignore it now. A few examples. A few weeks ago my dad and I were going over some orders that had to be delivered. We were referring to them by the persons last name since they both had the same first name. He asked me that status about Schindler’s order, this very quickly turned into a loud argument:
Me: Who?
Dad: Schindler?
Me: There’s no Schindler.
Dad: Don’t be an ass (this was not in a ‘joking’ manner), what’s going on with Schindler’s order?
Me: We don’t have a Schindler?
(now yelling at each other)
Dad: You know who I’m talking about.
(Bringing both orders over to him and slamming them on his desk)
Me: Schneider or Schindlehelm, which one are you talking about?
My dad has a really bad habit of mispronouncing words which I try as hard as I can to ignore as often as possible, but in this case he was truly combing both names and I had no idea which one he was talking about. It drives me nuts when he mispronounces things since he usually drops a syllable (says Telcheck instead of Telecheck) and for some reason, the way he does it, it tends to make his sound uneducated, which takes me to my next example.
Yesterday someone called to find out what soups we had, as he said the last one I heard him say “Hosen Pork Stew”. I looked over and as nicely as I could I said “I know you hate it when I correct you and I’m only saying this because you’re going to be saying it on the phone all day…it’s Hoisin, not Hosen, you can’t call it Hosen Pork Stew all day”
So, like the boy who cried wolf. If you correct people on the stuff that doesn’t matter, they won’t listen when it’s important. It’s still hard as hell for me to not correct people, but I figure if it doesn’t interfere with my life, I’ll just bite my tongue and move on. If people hate it so much when I correct them, I’ll just ignore it and let someone else correct them for me someday. For the record, if I’m wrong about something, I’d much rather be corrected (and I’ll verify the you tell me the next time I have access to a computer) then go around saying something wrong.
