Quirk #3

I am a walking encyclopedia/dictionary/thesaurus/grammar reference.

It may not be evident in my posts here, as I tend to be rather laid back about my own personal writing style (this is of course, for my own benefit, and not anyone else's after all), but according to other people, I am a queen of the english language.

I was first dubbed a walking dictionary when I was in middle school (6th grade to be exact), and any time someone needed to know how to spell something, all they had to do was ask me. This trend first started with my close friends, and quickly blossomed outwards to the entire population of the school -- teachers included.

Then, in highschool, it expanded to asking me the meanings and origins of words, as well as what other words mean the same thing.

Then, in college, people started to ask me the entire history of concepts... Which, surprisingly I was able to explain, despite having very little memory of having actually read them (I'm sure I have, but I've read so much, it all gets a little jumbled up).

After college, I became a fount of useless information. You know, silly little trivia facts that don't actually mean anything to society, but its knowledge nonetheless, so I'd absorbed it somewhere. Things like "Mel Gibson's first film was an Australian flick called Tim, in which he played a mentally challenged young man who fell in love with a much older, highly intellectual woman." Or other things like, "it takes more calcium to digest milk than you actually get out of the milk itself, so if you drink milk for the calcium, you're actually operating at a net loss of calcium."

Now, at work, I act as an ESL teacher for one of my co-workers, who is constantly asking me about various words she doesn't understand, and how to properly construct sentences (She's from Algeria, and speaks French and Arabic natively -- not English).

All this is not to say that I know every word out there... I don't. But when I was younger, I would (for the fun of it) read the dictionary, so I know more arcane words than most. (How many of you know what Pusillanimous means? hmmm? Or what word it is in the etymology for that's commonly used today to mean the same thing?)

I did learn a new word the other day... Dearth. I was reading a Canadian's blog, and found this word, and was like "omg! A word I don't know! Need to look it up!"
(for those of you wondering, it means "a severe lack")

I also think I'm one of the only people who considers being able to use the Oxford English Dictionary online a perk of their job... LOL.