The Pedantic Freebird

As if you haven’t been able to figure this out by now, GF and I love music. Our tastes do differ a little though. I grew up listening to a lot of rock-and-roll and in my early teens had a strong heavy metal/hair band thing so my tastes now tend to run more toward the classic rock spectrum. GF on the other hand listened to just about anything but heavy metal/hair band. She loves Bowie, Dylan & the Beatles so she’s not all bad. :-) She knows 80’s music at a level that few in the world could challenge. It’s only been since she’s known me that she’s been listening to more classic rock. We play “Whose that band?” all the time with the radio and her batting average hovers around 75% - she only gets tripped up on the slightly more obscure bands. (Meanwhile my 80’s band average is closer to 50%, if I’m lucky.)

Anyway, you can imagine my surprise the other day when she confessed that she never knew ‘Freebird.’ She knew of the song, she’d heard (of course), she knew it was Lynyrd Skynyrd, she just never listened to the words and put it all together until sometime last week. Yeah, I really mean, Freebird - the song that has become a cliché.

Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to tell you, but its important background to understand the rest of the story.

Last week I did some training at work. One of the things they had us do was a Myers-Briggs personality type test. I’ve done it in the past and I was actually interested to see if the results had changed as much as I have in the last 5 years. Alas, they were the same, although I still suspect that the clarity of the degrees may have changed. (I’m an INTP, if you must know.)

Regarding humor, my personality type had this to say:

Conceptualists generally have a well-developed sense of humor, although the amusing and humorous is usually subtle and, more often than not, based on a play on words. NTs especially enjoy humor which is ironical, or which contains unexpected double meaning, but this is not to say their wit is abstract or pedantic.

I sent this (and other) finding to GF in an email to which she simply responded:

I had to look up the word 'pedantic'... turns out it's in the dictionary right next to 'freebird'...

It’s OK if you don’t get it...