I can&#x27;t count the number of times in a public conversation I&#x27;ve heard people say, &quot;well maybe I&#x27;m just being anal.&quot; Gah. That isn&#x27;t a homonym people. You are literally referring to your asshole - or more precisely, a post-infantile stage of your development in which you developed a predilection for holding your shit in because you experienced conflict during toilet training. Which, for the record, has pretty firmly been debunked as some of Freud&#x27;s more ridiculous &quot;pop&quot; science.<p>It drives me nuts, but I&#x27;m well aware of how deeply that idiom has sunk its fangs into the English language. So I subconsciously roll my eyes and make a little wish that we could come up with a better idiom for describing fastidiousness and move on. Some things in life are not worth protesting...