I first read that sentence on the 16th of May 2003- my sixteenth birthday. To say that it changed my life would be a bit of an over-simplification, but not as much as you might think.

I read it in Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel by Scott Adams, which had been one of my birthday presents (along with three of REM’s 1980s albums, because I was cool like that).   Obviously, I wouldn’t have asked for it if I hadn’t already known that I liked Dilbert, but I liked it because it was clever and funny and contained weird little surreal bits featuring talking animals.  Until then, it hadn’t occurred to me that it might actually teach me something.

When I read that sentence (in a strip that can be found here), I did a bit of a double take.  That conversational tactic, that thing of “changing what I said into a bizarre absolute,” was exactly the kind of trick my parents pulled on me just about every time we argued.  You know the kind of thing- I’d disagree with something they said or did, and it would be, “Oh, so I suppose we’re the worst parents in the world, are we?”  And then the whole discussion would devolve into them naming other parents who they knew for a fact were worse than them, and me trying to reassure them that of course that wasn’t what I meant.  On some level, I realised that this tactic was less a response to whatever I’d said and more a way of getting me to shut up, but I could never find a way to properly respond to it.

Until now.

Over the course of that year, I learned a lot about how to argue and express myself.  I picked up skills from reading Dilbert, from watching Daria and the film version of Ghost World, and, strangely enough, from Ricky Gervais’ stand-up routines.  All these things taught me how to be precise about what I objected to and what I wanted instead, how to cut through meaningless waffle and find the truth, how to dodge attempts to derail my argument, and, maybe most importantly, how to be funny while I did it.  There’s always the temptation to idealise certain sections of the past and forget the more complicated details, but I don’t think it’s that much of an exaggeration to say that I started 2003 as an insecure fifteen-year-old who was pretty sure everything she said was somehow the wrong thing, and ended it as somebody who could sharpen words into weapons and aim them at any injustice I came across.  That sentence I read on my sixteenth birthday, along with hundreds of other sentences like it, helped me learn how to speak.

All of which is why it’s so upsetting to me that, since then, Scott Adams has gone completely bananas.