Skip to main content

In "The Secret life of Walter Mitty," Walter fails at several ordinary tasks. What are they?

The story opens with Walter Mitty having a few difficulties with his driving.  His wife notices him speeding and admonishes him to slow down.  Moments later, he is distracted at a red light and fails to drive on when the light changes until a police officer prompts him to move.


Walter Mitty becomes so engrossed in one of his daydreams that while imagining himself heroically repairing an "anesthetizer" with a fountain pen and then stepping in to take over a complicated surgery, he is unable to correctly park his car in a parking lot.


Mitty also remembers attempting to remove the snow chains from the tires of his car.  He somehow managed to get them wrapped around the axle of his car, requiring a young mechanic to come and remove them.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...

Is 'efficate' a word in English?

I routinely hear the word "efficate" being used. For example, "The most powerful way to efficate a change in the system is to participate." I do not find entries for this word in common English dictionaries, but I do not have an unabridged dictionary. I have checked the OED (I'm not sure if it is considered unabridged), and it has no entry for "efficate". It does have an entry for "efficiate", which is used in the same way. Wordnik has an entry for "efficate" with over 1800 hits, thus providing some evidence for the frequency of use. I personally like the word and find the meaning very clear and obvious when others use it. If it's not currently an "officially documented" word, perhaps its continued use will result in it being better documented.