The Ish Clause and PainterMan

I enjoy the Ish Clause. For those who may not know, when someone adds “ish” to the end of a word, most frequently regarding a time, they’re giving you a guesstimate or loose estimate (side note: somehow guesstimate is a real word according to Microsoft – you learn something new every day).

I don’t like to overuse the Ish Clause, and I certainly don’t like when others overuse it… that’s just outright abuse. And I don’t stand for abuse… in most cases at least.

Anyway, utilizing the Ish Clause allows for a window of opportunity, which I think is still pretty firm. In regard to time, when someone says “ish”, I don’t think that goes beyond 20 minutes in either direction; there’s definite boundaries for the Ish Clause.

Last week, a coworker told me he would have his PowerPoint slides to me around Wednesday-ish. It is currently Friday. I haven’t encountered a day-“ish” before, so I didn’t really know what to expect. The jury is still out, but I would say that in day-ish terms, there is a one-day window there; certainly, 20 minutes wouldn’t be appropriate, and 20 days is entirely too ridiculous a timeframe.


In other news, I got home after work yesterday to find painters hanging on the side of my house. Apparently the HOA had contracted them to repaint all the units in my area. I knew about this ahead of time, but they didn’t give a specific date they’d start painting.

So I walked inside, let the dog out, walked back into the living room and saw this, which doesn’t seem too safe to me:

















I was expecting PainterMan to come crashing through the window after I took his picture and really didn’t want to deal with that.

Fortunately he didn't.

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