You say tomato...

Here's a tough situation. Say you make a joke, maybe through email, based on a play of words where you purposefully twist the real meaning based on a clearly false, alternate meaning. It's a bit like a pun, not quite an ironic joke. What you get back is a huffy reply formally defining the word or words as if you didn't know or understand in the first place.

Awkward! Your ego immediately wants to jump into the game. "I know what the word means. See, see, I was just trying to make a joke. <Lame attempt at explanation follows>." It's aggravating. You want to defend your intelligence, but what you're having to do is confront someone else's lack of subtlety and imagination. Your ego gets in the way of cool, calm self-assurance. So what do you do?

Write a blog posting. Heh.

Actually, this made me think of McCain's snarky, "Senator Obama doesn't understand the difference between a strategy and a tactic." Obama was cool enough not to rise to the bait. But oh the irony!