![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I am a duhbrain
There is no other word to describe what I've just managed to do.
Shutting a car door, with one hand, on the other hand is easy enough to do, although the average human being doesn't do it very many times before learning not to.
But I have just managed to shut a car door with my left hand, and have it trap my left arm in the process. I didn't know that was even possible.
Clearly I am supremely competent at being supremely incompetent. Oh, and ouch.
no subject
What would you say that the difference between being a duhbrain, being incompetent and being clumsy were? The frequency that one does it? The inability to learn from mistakes? The inability to assess the consequences of your actions in advance? The inability to have an accurate enough sense of your own whereabouts?
no subject
I think incompetence is a very general term: you can be incompetent at practically anything, including both mental and physical skills. Clumsiness is a specific subclass of incompetence, namely being incompetent at the everyday physical skills that most people don't need to practice (such as opening and closing doors, holding a stationary item in your hand without dropping it, walking on a flat surface without tripping over).
"Duhbrain" I'm reserving here for particularly impressive forms of incompetence, in this case managing a failure mode that I would previously have assumed wasn't even possible. I might also apply it in other different sorts of extreme cases too; it's a word I'll only resort to when I don't think any of the ones I normally use carry enough weight. (Hence, it's only extreme because I'm saying it and it's so far out of character for my normal vocabulary. From a 12-year-old schoolboy it's probably a very mild insult and he'd have to think of something better if he wanted more emphasis.)
Why are we discussing the linguistics of insults in depth, incidentally? I mean, not that it isn't kinda fun, but it's not something I'd have expected to be asked out of the blue :-)
no subject