"It's a matter of right and wrong." No,it's a matter of you being an annoying dick.

Which is why Chuck, the homeopath, is banned from the blog...
If you proselytize, it may be time to shut you up with a few choice facts.

I e-mailed Amy after she did a show with Temple Grandin where basically she was calling a colleagues work "pigeon do do" and it cracked me up. Eventually someone taught her not to do that outloud.

Oops meant Temple would go around calling colleagues work pigeon do do to their face and had to learn not to do that.

It's no fun living with someone with Aspergers. It isn't just that he is always right about everything, there is no gray area to human behavior. It's right or wrong with nothing in between. He's condescending to me and talks to me as if I were a not very bright child. If I call him on it, then I'm being rude. I don't want to "win", I just don't want to lose all the time.

Living with it,

Is it your partner you're talking about? Why do you stay?

People with Aspergers tend to do best with each other romantically.

See Sheldon Cooper of 'The Big Bang Theory'. It's a nothing-much show, except for Jim Parsons' spot-on portrayal of just such a character.

Many engineers and high-tech people are exactly like this.

To the instant point - while we all care about 'right and wrong', we should also care about the feelings of others, and not hurt them unnecessarily. When discussing the correct value of Young's modulus for Domex XF100, right and wrong are very important. In social conversation, correct pronunciation? - not so much. And unless you are an English professor or an ESL teacher, it's really not your place to give lessons.

Empathy for others is what sets the higher primates apart from all other species.

The 'autism spectrum' has already been raised. But our generous hostess calls attention to the 'difficulty in understanding how others feel', which is also a point on the sociopathic spectrum. Might be something to watch for . . . .

llater,

llamas

I used to have a tendency to correct people on rather minor details, like English. But I found that I wasn't well-liked because of it. I eventually learned to keep my mouth shut anytime I overheard a conversation with incorrect grammar or getting some detail of a movie or TV show wrong.

However, there are times in which I simply cannot contain myself. I used to work in a small room with other people. One of them was talking about growing up on a farm. There was a peacock and it laid eggs. This was more than my brain could handle and I went into an absolute Asperger rage: "YOUR PEACOCK DID NOT LAY EGGS! THE PEACOCK IS MALE! IT'S THE PEAHEN THAT IS FEMALE AND LAYS THE EGGS!" Everybody had shocked looks on their faces. The woman telling the story quietly admitted that it was a peahen.

I work w/ and manage a bunch of people who have this trait, most of whom probably do have a touch of the asp.

What makes aspys difficult to work with isn't simply that they lack social skills, but they also often believe that they're smarter than everyone else and wont admit when they're wrong.

One of the people I'm thinking of cost us about $200K in man hours to fix software that he had modified w/o authorization. He refused to assist fix the changes because he wouldn't admit that he had broken anything. Arguing with him about this was like arguing with a child. So we had to fire him. He was a decent software engineer, but we realized that we couldn't trust him.

Can we please not pretend here that social pontificating is the exclusive realm of scientists, engineers, and individuals with cognitive disorders?

Yes, people such as this do exist... but I have identified a pattern here and elsewhere that these tend to be the only individuals who gain social sanction for these types of behaviors.

For example, llamas provides the following exception:

"In social conversation, correct pronunciation? - not so much. And unless you are an English professor or an ESL teacher, it's really not your place to give lessons."

Why exactly are we supposed to give english professors and teachers a free pass to correct pronunciation in a public social context outside of a classroom?

People aren't generally looking for those types of lessons in the middle of a social conversation... even when chatting up an english professor.

If the LW was an english professor would that suddenly make his behavior acceptable?

I get the distinct impression that what is really going on with most conversations like this is that people who aren't in the ENTJ/INTJ groups find it extremely irritating to be corrected by those who do fall into those groups due to some underlying belief that it is their domain to do the correcting in social circumstances.

Can't we all just agree that this type of behavior is obnoxious regardless of who it comes from instead of pretending it only comes from one small segment of society?

I am reminded of the recent story where the scientist wore a shirt covered in cartoons for an interview and was ripped to shreds... it wasn't scientists, engineers, and people with asperger's syndrome jumping down his throat and criticizing him about the minutia of a loud shirt... it was liberal arts types doing it, who so far as this conversation is concerned should have known better and should have had more empathy.

I am an ESL teacher and I care DEEPLY about language. Many of my family members (husband included) and in-laws mangle the language on a regular basis and I bite my tongue because I care more about being kind than being right.
The only people I correct are my students--IN CLASS, and my children--IN PRIVATE.

Why exactly are we supposed to give english professors and teachers a free pass to correct pronunciation in a public social context outside of a classroom?

The way I read that post from llamas was that, unless you are a teacher *giving a lesson,* it's not OK to correct others. I don't think llamas was giving English/ESL teachers a free pass to correct everyone outside the classroom.

But I agree with the rest of your post. It's not just science/tech types who do this. There's a guy in our social circle who's been nicknamed "Actually" because all his sentences start with a condescending "Aaaactually ..." followed by a lengthy correction of some mundane thing someone said. Nobody wants to hang out with him, except on bar trivia night.

Sofar,

Your interpretation of what llamas said might be the correct one. It was difficult for me to tell given the jump from "In social conversation, correct pronunciation? - not so much." to using the word "unless" in the very next sentence.

If what llamas meant was that unless the professor/teacher was *giving a lesson* then I am completely on board.

I also agree with Lori that there is a time and a place for that kind of correction to occur.

I for one would appreciate if a loved one were to pull me aside or wait until later to point something out to me that I may have gotten wrong. I think the general idea should be not to try to needlessly embarrass someone in a public setting.

By the same token, if you can help someone you care about avoid potential social embarrassment in the future that is nice too (presuming it is approached in a private way).

I can't imagine the people doing the correcting are having very much fun, let alone the people being corrected. I can't imagine connecting with a young woman if I was always correcting her on grammar and so on. I think I would just suck the fun right out of the entire room.

How can I help her understand that I just care about getting the facts out?

That may very well be your intent but what you should understand is that other people -- or certainly most other people -- don't care about those facts.

What Sofar said.

Regarding this:

'I can't imagine the people doing the correcting are having very much fun, . . . .'

I don't agree. I know several people for whom doing this sort of thing brings great satisfaction and some kind of affirmation - the kind of people who will whip out a smartphone in the middle of a conversation to Google the matter and prove that they are right. I once got an e-mail next day, addressed to the entire group that was part of the conversation, and filled with links and C&Ps supporting the writer's assertions. Some people just need to be right, and to be seen to be right, no matter what, and will chase that need far beyond the boundaries of social convention.

I agree that this tendency is not confined to STEM-type people - lawyers and educators seem to have it quite a bit too. It's just that it seems to be particularly-prevalent among STEM types, probably because precision and accuracy are highly-valued traits in those fields and people who can clearly and confidently state facts gain social approval among their peers.

llater,

llamas

llamas makes a very good point. I tend to have a streak of perfectionism with regard to language, facts, and numbers. I also have a degree in math, enjoy computer programming, and am generally a science lover.

In general social conversation, this type of behavior isn't conductive to relationship building. However, in high-precision workplaces, sometimes it is. If somebody says heteroscadsticity when they meant homoscedasticity, well, that needs to be addressed or we'll have confusion. :)

Shannon, that's true! It's often necessary to do in work conversations where the shared purpose isn't social. In such a situation, everyone does tend to have an understanding that this is for clarity. Still basic politeness is helpful. I tend to take this on myself, such as "Hey just for my own clarification, we mean..." Making the problem on my own and then referring to "we" is helpful to lesson embarrassment if addressing an error is necessary.

That said, in social situations it's often just completely unnecessary and if the point is to have fun, it's more fun to concentrate on what two people have in common, isn't it? =)