The Low Maintenance Verification Test

Yesterday at work I was chatting with a coworker, as one does, about a different co-worker, as one also does.*

*In a super friendly positive way, not in a bitchy behind their back kind of way.**

**Because that totally never happens***

*** That sentence is going to get super ironic in couple paragraphs

At one point I said something along the line of 'Oh, she's great.  She's super low maintenance.'  Then I remembered that we're now in an open plan office space and she could very well have heard me say that. 

So I felt awkward about it for a minute. 

And then it occurred to me that 'low maintenance' is not actually an insulting thing to be called

So I felt OK for a minute.

Then it occurred to me that I'm not really offended by anything at any time and so I might not be the best judge on that sort of thing, and then I was completely confused about the entire issue.

And so I took an informal workplace poll.

Helpful friend Sarah at work (she of the Ducks and Bunnies) thought about the question for a moment and said, 'You know- if you ARE offended by being called Low Maintenance that kind of proves you aren't.' 

And thus was witnessed the birth of a beautiful thing -

A sentence that fact checks itself.

Think how amazing the world would be if all sentences in English contained that feature.  Michele Bachmann would never be able to speak again, and that alone makes it worth doing.

All we need is a complete reconstruction of idiomatic grammar, so anyone out there with a time machine and a passing interest in linguistics, this is your call.