Size Small? How hard is this?

Dear Dickhole:

All I was trying to do was buy a superhero T Shirt at a comic book convention. Let me recap our conversation for you:

You: (plausibly friendly) Does anyone need a hand with anything?

Me: Yes, actually, I could use a hand. I don’t suppose you have any shirts in a size small?

You: (turning slightly) No Man, we never do, we just never – not at the conventions.

Me: Oh. I see. But you have an online store, is that right?

You: (getting douchey) Yeah, but you’ll never bother me there.

Me: I beg your Pardon?

You: (douchier still) I said you’re never gonna bother me there Man.

Me: I see…

You: (getting your shovel) Yeah, cause in the last 5 years I have had, like, 2 orders for size small stuff.

Me: Look, it’s okay, I’ll move on…

You (digging a trench for the battle): Yeah, and you know what’s wrong with you small people?

Me: (in silence, but having a feeling you are about to tell me what’s wrong with my people) …No?

You: (continuing the arms race without provocation): I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you small people. First we sell the XL, then the L, then the M, and we used to bring in a few smalls, but, see, we always have to sell you stuff on clearance, because you people drive the prices down.

Me: (mustering some logic) That’s ironic, because I usually find I have to buy stuff at regular price before they run out of my size…

You: (full on racist) No, that’s not how you do it. You wait until things go on clearance, and force me to drop my prices.

Me: (with an explanation, but lacking the willpower to bother) Uh yeah, okay then…

You: (Energizer Bunny of defensiveness) Yeah man, so you’re never gonna bother me online, I can’t do business like that. I’m sorry man. It’s just never gonna happen. There is no demand.
Me: (unCanadianly leaving without saying “thank you” or apologizing) Uh huh…

Dickhole, there was simply not enough time or reason for me to stand there and explain to you that marketing to smaller and larger sizes is, indeed, a niche business. There was no need to explain that I worked retail for 7 years, and that I sold a lot of size 7 shoes and size 14 shoes because I stocked them. Did I stock a million? No. Would I special order for people? Yes. Could I have started an online t shirt business and sold more than 2 size small shirts if I had offered them? Oh yes. I could also have stocked, nay, I would also have stocked 3XL.

Perhaps you are only losing 15% of your potential sales by spending your spare time dry humping your cat instead of business planning. I’m sure you enjoy stripping down naked and having your sharp-clawed cat swat angrily at your now unrecognizably scarred penis. I imagine that the time you save by not ordering size small is partially spent convincing yourself you are not losing any business at all, and partially spent engaged in your regularly scheduled cat rape.

Your impressive scapegoating of “The Small People” goes beyond my ability to rationalize. The conspiratorial objective of “my people” to ruin your business by ordering a product which you are unwilling to provide is indeed sinister. In fact, I have a confession:

We are out to get you. Even though I am 5’9”, and I weigh 140 of your Imperial Earth Pounds, (or 64 of your base 10 Earth Kilograms), I am still the leader of the small people. They chose me because I am medium sized, and I can blend in to your world of towering gigantic gods (Do you all have golden penises? Can I touch yours? Maybe not yours, yours is a fleshy disfigured knot, but one of the other Tall Person wieners?). We sit deep inside our lair – okay, we sit deep inside an H&M store, waiting for the day that you have invested too heavily in size smalls. Then, we will wait much too long to buy them,  so you feel you must discount them! Only once you have discounted your shirts, will we then purchase them, wear them, and somehow mass-advertise and tell our friends how we masterfully bought t-shirts at 75% of the price the rest of you foolish Tallies! The Earth will be thrown into chaos! How dare the Smallites save nearly $4 on their t shirts! Soon, the Tallies will riot, and demand you also give them each $4! All because we Smallites colluded to buy your shirts, and then daringly wore those same shirts around!

Hyperbole aside, you sell shirts at a comic book convention. Where else would you expect to find, amongst the chubby nerds (who I am not denigrating, my friends are mostly chubby nerds, and many of them have exceedingly hot wives and girlfriends),  would you also find a veritable shitload of skinny nerds? And teenagers? My god, skinny nerds and teenagers must have been 40% of the people at the convention! What about the kids? Easily 10% of the people in that room were nerdy fathers ( presumably with hot wives) and kids! WHAT ABOUT THE HOT WIVES? I spoke personally to at least one hot wife who could not buy a t shirt due to its immense size! There were thousands of non-giant nerdy women at that convention. Literally Thousands! What are the ladies supposed to wear? Wait, I see what you are doing, you are refusing to sell clothing to the ladies because you hope they will be forced to manufacture their own tight fitting superhero costumes, and then help you lasso your cat for raping.

I’m not asking for much. You don’t have my size? Fine. Just don’t be a weird prejudiced dickhole about it.

Oh, hey, Dawn Soap.

Um, so I think it’s great you can be used to scrub crude oil off of ducks, and stuff.

Um, but, um, do you need to be used to scrub simulated oil off of real marine animals in your ads?

Because, um, along with disliking being scrubbed raw from toxic heavy oil, baby otters and ducklings also dislike being doused with paint and having their natural insulating oils scrubbed off them.

I asked the otters, and they really don’t care why they are having their important natural oils power-sanded into desert-with-eczema-dryness from their tender skin.

So, thanks for simulating those duck scrubbings for the ads on TV.

Also, you guys should google “hypocrisy” and “retards”.

Fuck you guys in the ear,

Lovingly,
RobbieRobTown

IN THE BEGINNING, there was The Eighties. And the Eighties were wrong in the eyes of The Lord, and the sinners who worked at American Apparel had been born in the 90′s, and they knew not how wrong they were to dress that way. And they knew not that pulp-porn imagery is creepy, and they knew not of how to work at a real job. The Lord looked upon American Apparel, and he frowned.

1. Yea, and the sky will crack, and fire will rain down, and those wearing retro non-prescription glasses frames from the eighties will be blinded immediately, and they will run in the streets and bleed from their anuses. For Vanity shall be the sin which ends the world. “Glasses are for seeing, not for fashion” sayeth The Lord, and The Lord shall say “Enough with the glasses, especially if you don’t need them. How about I give you all a bleeding anus disease?”. And so it shall be.

2. And the number of the beast shall be $14.99, and the v neck t-shirts will dive so low as to be purposeless to protect their chests from the horrible radiation. And those without the trust in the lord will bake doubly fast in their shiny stretch pants for they are reflective and increase the heat.

3. And there will be a plague of locusts. And the manager will give you a sour look, and point at a section where an item of clothing might be found instead of walking you over there to show you where to find said item, yea, though it is an item you wish to purchase. And the Lord shall say “Hey, nobody is hip enough to avoid customer service. My son died on a crucifix for your sins, what was so hard for you today that you can’t crack a smile? Your Mika remix CD is scratched?”. And the manager shall be slain for poor role modeling and douchebaggery.

4. And The Beast shall come in many forms. And he will be wearing a totally shapeless cotton dress. And The Beast shall look fat no matter how many belts The Beast may choose to wear. Even thought The Beast is normal sized, The Beast will totally look really fat, for realsies. And The Beast shall give you the worst service of all, because the beast has self esteem issues because the beast is surrounded by hipsters.

5. And the self esteem issues of The Beast shall be caused by the hipsters surrounding them, for they know not what power they wield over The Beast. And they shall say unto her, with their retarded bow ties askew, “Hey Bethany, I totally like that shapeless dress on you, but Brittany totally pulls it off better and she is wearing it today”.

6. And the Beast shall get all pissy, and yea, tho it offendeth the Lord, ALL the employees shall be pissy, and they will all be sexually promiscuous because they are surrounded by pornographic ad campaigns which depict young unhappy women looking like they are just wondering when the photographer is going to rape them.

7. And the ad campaigns will cause confusion amongst the men, who wonder if they are horny for skinny teens in shapeless cotton sacks, like some kind of weird morgue fantasy with people wearing body bags.

8. And the mannequins for the leggings will be a row of sticking-out asses like an implausible train-to-be-a-stripper class, and the misogynistic wrongness of the mannequins will raise the eyebrows of even the most insensitive of males. And the males shall start to feel uncomfortable, surrounded by the weird child porn and sexually more-than-suggestive mannequins, and The Lord shall say “Fear not, for I think that’s all a bit too far as well, and it gives me the creepies also”.

9. And The Lord will smite American Apparel, and he shall really smite it up. He will smite it like it’s never been smitten before. He will smite the fuck out of every last pair of assless pantyhose, and he might smite H&M a bit too, even if their stuff fits him.

So sayeth the book of Retail Rvelations

File under: Awkward Usage, Modern language, “Literally”

Hello, Modern Language Users:

Um, hey, gosh guys, I’m not sure how to put this. You know when you say things like “That was literally the biggest meal ever”, or “That was literally off the hizzy”? You know what I’m talking about? Yeah, about that…

Yeah, um, I’m no Grammar Nazi, I mean, not anymore, and I certainly enjoy the flexibility of writing in this casual style. It’s just that I think what you think “literally” means isn’t what it means? Ya know?

If something is literal, it exists or occurs precisely as the phrase you use to describe the event or object. This is in opposition to something being “figurative” , and we (and by we, I mean, apes who can read the printed word) quite often use the word “literally” to explain the subtle irony of something having the attributes of being figurative (metaphorical, non-real), but having occurred precisely as the metaphorical device describes it. Now, I think some of you use “literally” in a hyperbolic way, so let me provide an example.

If my girlfriend left me- I’m sorry- If I had a girlfriend and she left me, I could say “So and so left me, and I fell to pieces, figuratively” to describe my distraught emotional state. However, if my girlfriend left me and notified me by planting a live grenade in my anus, with my dying breath I could gather the bloody ribbons of my violently redistributed internal organs and utter the phrase- again note the subtle irony here- “So and so left me, and I LITERALLY fell to pieces.”.

See how that works? Now, contextually, it seems a bit like when we say “literally” we are exaggerating the outcome, and the feeling of hyperbole carries over to how some of you charming-but-tediously-retarded folks use the word in other contexts. “Literally” is not used to emphasize the scale or importance of something, it is simply contextually linked to such events when used correctly. It seems to emphasize something because of the unlikelihood of an event which is metaphorical or figurative being played out in real life.

So, just to clarify, because I know some of you kids go a bit squinty when we talk language, here is an alternative example:

When you say “that was literally the biggest meal ever that I just ate”, what you mean is ‘That was figuratively the biggest meal ever”, or even more probably you mean “that was a very large meal”. However, if you just consumed LITERALLY the biggest meal ever (“Evar” for those of you who are LOLcats) the fact that you are alive and aren’t hospitalized from a burst stomach or, say, the crushing gravitational pull of the largest meal ever suggests to me that you did not mean “literally”. Oh, and backtracking a bit, I meant “probably” literally, not subjectively- like, there is a greater probability that you mean “That was a very large meal.”.

I recently heard someone say “this [party] is literally off the hizzy”.

There is so little meaning embedded in that arrangement of words that even Roland Barthes would be hard pressed to defend your inexplicable linguistic construct.

Do I even dare break this down? I do? Okay, I will.

“This [party]“: Fine. We understand that the party is the subject of your clause, well done. A verb should complete this. In fact, you didn’t even say the word “party”, but you implied it with gestures. You could have meant “this wonderful evening” or “this happenstance meeting of a doe-eyed brunette woman and you, Rob, only you” instead of “party”, but we basically get that you are referring to the events of the night in general.

“This [party] is“: Also fine, “is” is an intransitive verb. You are about to tell me in what state the “party” exists, or how it is to be. I might add here that we loosely understand that the “party” is inclusive the people, place and mood of the event, so however we describe the party next is referring to the sum of these things as if they were a single subject.

“This [party] is literally“: So far so good, whatever the party “literally” is, it had better not be a metaphor or conceit of any kind.

“This [party] is literally off the hizzy“. STOP. NO. HOLD THE FIGURATIVE PHONE. You have eradicated all meaning from your words. You might as well speak in gibberish. Let’s break this down again

“off the hizzy“: This is a slang adaptation of “off the hook”, as in “the phone is off the hook” as in “this event is of enough importance that the phone, so as not disturb our important event, has been taken off of it’s telephone cradle or “hook”.

As the mechanics say, “well, here’s your problem right here”:

“This [party] is literally off the hizzy“: You are telling me that this party, which, firstly, you never actually clarified was specifically what you were referring to because you didn’t say party, and secondly, which is a collection of people in a place enjoying festivities, has been removed, in its entirety, people, location, and all, from what I am to understand, only colloquially, is a large hook (or cradle) like a telephone has.

Not only have you used a slang phrase to describe the state of existence of the sum of the things that make up this party, but you have implied that it is somehow being transported atop some kind of giant telephone.

You. Don’t. Mean. Literally.

You could have just said “This party is off the hizzy.” and I would have understood this as a metaphorical construction. We’re all used to that sort of thing. “Our love is the ocean.” or “This is heaven.” are metaphors we understand. If you say “Our love is literally the ocean” that becomes uniquely inexplicable, and if you say “this is literally heaven” then you have shaken the last of my Judeo-Christian faith by exposing me to the outstanding shittiness of heaven on a day to day basis.

Now, I may not be an expert per se, and God knows a discussion of my extensive use of the parenthetical comma  could fill an entire essay, but I can read a dictionary, and I do know what “literally” means, and to quote Inigo Montoya, “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”.

Anyways, you guys, I hope that clears some things up, because I have literally had it up to here with your incorrect usage of the word “literally” and I am literally going to lose it, and I am literally going to kill you if you don’t stop it, because you are literally an amoebic shit stain if you can’t get this.

Fun bonus puzzle: Figure out what I actually meant in my last sentence!

The Correctness has been receiving a fair amount of e-mail looking for clarifications and understand about plot points in famous films. We, as always, are correct, and aim to spread understanding in these cases. Let us begin.

Dear Correctness,

Was the gun that Edward Norton’s character uses at the end of Fight Club real, or was it imaginary like Tyler Durden?

Jim in Brooklyn

- Jim,

The Correctness follows very strict guidelines in these matters, and as such we would be breaking the first two rules of Fight Club to discuss this.

Dear Correctness,

if Darth Vader became good again at the end of Return of the Jedi, why did Luke burn his body?

Drew in Toronto

-Drew,

Really? That confused you? It was similar to a Viking Burial. It was a respectful gesture, not an angry one. Damn, I’m surprised you didn’t get that. Huh.

Dear Correctness,

How come Lois Lane is alive at the end of Superman. She died in the earthquake in her car.

Jerry in Portland

-Jerry,

Did you not see the part where Superman flew around the Earth a whole bunch of times, really fast? He was reversing time, in order to save Lois. Maybe you were in the bathroom for that part or something.

Dear Correctness,

How come Sylar was still alive after the Season 1 finale of Heroes? We saw him get destroyed.

Jane in L.A.

-Jane,

Look. Heroes is just retarded. Only morons are still watching that shit.That’s all you need to know.

Dear Correctness,

Was Bruce Willis’ character in the Sixth Sense really dead?

Terry in Dallas

-Terry,

Holy crap. Are you really asking that? It was pretty much the whole point of the movie. I need an aspirin.

Dear Correctness,

I’ve never understood this one: In the movie “The Godfather”, which character was The Godfather. It’s very confusing to me.

Gail in St. Louis

Gail,

No. No way. Bullshit. No one is that fucking stupid. You go to hell, Gail.

Dear Correctness,

When you answered that question about Fight Club, what was that bit about the rules. I don’t remember any rules. I don’t get it.

Gill in Tokyo

Gill,

Again, I think you’re jerking my chain. First, EVERYONE knows the First Rule of Fight Club. EVERYONE. Secondly, how did you read the earlier question , when it’s clearly in the same article as this one. Look, when I agreed to do this answers crap, I figured people were going to ask questions about the ending of the Prestige, or the timeline of Donnie Darko, or whatever that mess of an ending of “No Country For Old Men” was. Hell, I was ready to go on at length about the meaning of “There Will Be Blood” and why it 10 times as good as you probably think it is. But this stuff is ridiculous.  “I don’t get the ending of Superman???” You are the kind of people that go to Transformers, knowing full well it will be a big sack of crap.

Dear Correctness,

Why was it called “Finding Nemo”, when there was no character calle

Fuck it, I’m done.