I have tried this numerous times and feel that it is a valid process.
If you suspect that someone is anal retentive, you ask them if anal retentive has a hyphen in it.
If they say Yes or No, then they are.
If they say, who cares? Then they’re not.
(bolding mine)
“if”
The thread title should read “How to tell if one is anal retentive.”
Sorry, that was bugging me.
What?
Actually “how to tell [if] one is anal retentive” would refer to a process by which one assesses their own propensity vis a vis anal retention, not that of another party.
My trick is to leave 3 magazines neatly overlapped on the coffee table with the 4th one askew and see if they fix it. What’s really great is if you can get someone who likes piles and someone who likes spreads and they spend the rest of the afternoon piling the magazines in a stack and fanning them out.
Would the anal retentive be the one who would go to this much trouble just to find out who might be anal retentive?
I find anal retentive people tend to be listmakers. I am a constant source of frustration due to my inability come up with anything resembling a cohesive grocery list.
When I’m getting to know someone new, it’s worth the small effort for me. I’m uncomfortable in the presence of that special brand of low level tension that Type A’s generate as the move about a world not ordered to their liking. I appreciate their neatness and powers of organization, but the minutiae of their feedback like lint-picking, adjusting my personal items, and worrying over my plate gets old.
Not to be anal retentive about this, but ‘one’ is used correctly here to refer to some unknown third party agent who might possible also include oneself, as in, “Love the one you’re with.” If one means to reference oneself, then one uses ‘oneself.’
how do you mean fix?
place the fourth overlapped matching the others.
arrange by cover date and then place all four overlapped matching the three original.
arrange by ISSN then arrange by cover date and then place all four overlapped matching the three original.
Scour Ebay and old bookstores to acquire all issues of each magazine from its first issue, arrange by date, order collections alphabetically with spines flush with the bookcase’s shelf’s edge.
Isn’t there a diff between “obsessive/compulsive” and “anal retentive”?
For Freud, not much. For modern psychology, a non-question since “anal rententiveness” is a discredited theory.
In common parlance, a matter of degree.
“One” definitely does not apply to me.
Today I have to go to my office and clean it out after a water pipe broke over the weekend. I’ve been in that office for 34 years…so possibly “Paper Hoarder” might be closer to the truth, cause “Hey, ya never know.”
Ya never know when a pipe might burst and you’ll need all that paper to act as a giant sponge to soak it all up?
Yeah - my husband is the hoarder and I’m the (anal-retentive) anti-hoarder. It’s an awesome dynamic. We complete each other!
I wanted to jump in here and say “How hard is it?” But I realized that might classify me as one of the anal retentives.
I just like organization. I am definitely a left brain type of girl. As to the OP, some of us just like correct grammar and spelling. If that makes me anal retentive so be it.