Obtuse...not quick or alert in perception, feeling, or intellect; not sensitive or observant; dull.
People may dislike being called "obtuse" but it is not, by standard, an insult. Instead it suggests a refusal to see something apparent to others, or a willful ignorance or insensitivity to the real facts of a situation.
At first I thought the person who e-mailed me complaining that comments are not permitted on this blog was being obtuse. Of course, you can comment. Just look at some of the posts...they have comments. My guess is that the person didn't know how to comment. You click on "no comments." I admit that may be confusing, but that's the way Blogger has it set up.
Another complaint was that everything they read here can be found, word for word, elsewhere by various sources on the web and that I "borrowed" the info and experiences from others...the posts on this site are not original.
Except for the part about "experiences" all that is pretty much true because you can find this information on other sites...here it is usually collated and condensed to make the posts shorter.
If the complainer had looked in the upper left hand corner they would have read, "If I find something interesting, informative, or silly, I post it here." It should be clear that anything posted here is something I found, not something I did original research on or personally experienced although in the specific post they complained about I mentioned an anecdote my father told me about my grandmother.
I was reminded of the time I was playing on an online chess site and was using as a handle the name of a long dead chess player. In one of the forums, a guy called me a liar for claiming to be that particular player because I'd be over 100 years old. He had actually searched the United States Chess Federation's rating list and only found a couple of players with the same last name, but they weren't very good.
The same guy also called out another poster when it was mentioned that a certain book on Boris Spassky was the one that Bobby Fischer used to carry around. This poor fellow went off on the person making the post because, as it turned out, he believed the poster was claiming that it was the actual book that was in Fischer's personal possession. When he finally understood that it was not the actual book, but a copy, he insisted that the poster cite the source for the claim.
Anyway, as I thought on the e-mail, I realized that "obtuse" is not the right word. Maybe "literal thinker" is.
Literal thinkers are people who take into consideration what the words they speak and hear mean in concrete terms.
They tend to apply the most literal meaning to words, and have trouble seeing the big picture because they will focus on the details of each word.
They are people who are unable to consider figurative uses of words and, consequently, it can be frustrating for both the speaker and literal thinker when someone is trying to communicate with them because they simply do not think like most people.
Literal thinkers are not all bad! They are likely to be better at understanding rules, utilizing concrete information, visualizing information and working through rule-based stuff such as math problems. Interestingly, literal thinkers usually do not engage in sarcasm, slang, vulgarity, flowery language or cliche sayings.
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