A story about calibration
Dec. 20th, 2012 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoyFor a long time I didn't know what the phrase "double parking" referred to.
From the way people used it, obviously it was a way that people sometimes parked; one that was obstructive, illegal, wrong. But just what problematic parking practice were they referring to? The "double" suggested to me that maybe they meant parking so as to take up two spaces (say, by parking on top of a line instead of inbetween them). But further example uses of the term showed that that couldn't be what it was.
I went through various other hypotheses but none of them ever quite fit how I heard the term used (and most didn't fit the name). What on earth could it refer to?
When I actually found out what it meant, I was horrified.
-Harry
(Why does this post get the golden apple userpic, of all things? I'll let you figure out why I think it's appropriate.)
From the way people used it, obviously it was a way that people sometimes parked; one that was obstructive, illegal, wrong. But just what problematic parking practice were they referring to? The "double" suggested to me that maybe they meant parking so as to take up two spaces (say, by parking on top of a line instead of inbetween them). But further example uses of the term showed that that couldn't be what it was.
I went through various other hypotheses but none of them ever quite fit how I heard the term used (and most didn't fit the name). What on earth could it refer to?
When I actually found out what it meant, I was horrified.
-Harry
(Why does this post get the golden apple userpic, of all things? I'll let you figure out why I think it's appropriate.)
