Sorry about the title, but really didn’t know how to put it most clearly and most punchily. Driving along to work this morning, I reflected on one of my prejudices, namely, that people who use multiple negation I distrust. You know the type of thing: “He neither claimed not to know what had in reality not happened, nor to be ignorant of the non-reality of non-being.” That sort of nonsense. As CS Lewis put it, “any fool can write learned language; the vernacular’s the thing.”
So that’s one of my little internal “is this person okay or are they dodgy” tests. What are yours?
AND people who send me letter with my name spelled wrongly. That is, I mean, offices and so on that have certainly seen how my (very short and simple) name is spelled. It does tend to make me wonder why they should be trusted to get any details correct at all. Little things, like council tax and so on. On, yes, and it’s worrying when the doctor’s surgery does that.
Re spelling names wrong, I can understand people who do it to put the other person down (“You’re so unimportant that I don’t care how to spell your name”), but when it’s done through carelessness or incompetence, it’s irredeemable. I hav a very difficult name; thus when it’s spelled *right * on an envelope I notice!
And when someone who’s never met me pronounces it right, then I know that either they have met me or my family, or they know someone who knows me/my family.
Undoubtedly you are. Anyone who joins threads I start is gifted. And if you are super-gifted, you will no doubt be able to hunt down my surname (or at least the tricky part thereof) through information provided on this very site!
I tend to use such language (double-negatives and such.) It’s not a matter of being dodgy, but rather of having read too much 19h century literature…and having had my first LARGE writing task be to convert The Count of Monte Cristo into a screenplay. 200 pages-worth of channeling Alexandre Dumas* does wonders for the obtuseness at which one can write and yet find it spring from the fingertips with nary a thought.
TV documentaries; when they speculate about what something might have been or might have meant, then when they come back after the break, they’re treating their own speculation as fact, I have to switch off, for the good of my tooth enamel.
I also have a reflexive reaction to absolute declarations; for example, if someone says X never happens, I immediately start trying to imagine a scenario in which it might.
Even worse when it’s something handwritten, and the author uses two exclamation points, and then makes a little smiley face at the bottom with the dots from the exclamation points. It always makes me want to smack them and say, “What, are you five? Write like an adult!”
Saw an example of this on HK TV not so long ago (from UK, I believe), in which soem tosspot speculated on Jesus’s brothers and sisters, who they were, what they ate etc. The most idiotic part was when he claimed that the Bible supported his claim that Jesus had siblings in the first place. “No!” I shouted out in that voice that normally alerts my family to the fact that I’m watching Man Utd play football or England play rugby and am disputing a refereeing decision, “the Bible records iot as historical fact. You’re the one doing all the speculating!”
You can’t tell if someone is lying to you by whether he’s looking you in the eye or not. Honest-but-shy people will avoid contact while psychos will bore in on you. Plus there’s the cultural factor: I once heard an inner-city schoolteacher say that when a Mexican kid was looking away, he was thinking about what she was telling him, but if he was looking directly at her she knew she was about to be hit; while the opposite was true of Black kids.
So for me, a good shibboleth of someone’s veracity is if they touch their nose while giving me their spiel. If they touch their nose, they are lying.
Incorrect use of “myself”, as in “My sister and myself went to the store”. ARGH!
Unnecessary obfustication in an attempt to sound authoritive - “We ascertained that the perpetrator gained unforced access through the east entry”. IOW, he got in through the unlocked back door. Very popular among police and fire spokesmen.
People who say “Ten PM at night” or “11 AM tomorrow morning”. You don’t need both qualifiers, people. One of our local TV weathermen does this all the time. I can’t bear to watch him anymore.
Also an attempt to over-compensate for a perceived (and usually actual) lack of education. I have to work closely on a committee with a policeman, and he writes (or speaks) screeds of stuff, even quoting the dictionary at times, which is sad, to a) sound as educated as me (pretty frigging difficlut, I can assure you) and b) assert his power.
If someone giving me child-raising advice mentions kidnapping as a problem to be careful to guard against, or as a potential result of certain situations (eg going next door to visit the neighbor while your baby sleeps) I will automatically dismiss everything else they have to say.
I might no longer like Slithy Tove. Sorry, mate, I used to have quite a habit of touching my nose: a silly habit, no doubt, but I assure you it had nothing to do with lying or intending to mislead in any way.
Liars, I assume, will have read the same dodgy things as everyone else about eye-contact, touching noses, and body-language stuff and would quite probably deliberately avoid doing such things.
And, moving on, how about people who say " … between you and I …"? I detest that one.
On, yes, and it’s worrying when the doctor’s surgery does that. 
