I may be drunk - but you're Hitler, as it were

If there's one thing I love, it's quoting myself. Yesterday, I wrote the following:

"A funny ad for a funky show, as it were".

Now that quirky little English expression - "as it were" - got me thinking. Which in turn got me Googling. Which led me to a hilarious page called "How to Win Arguments, As It Were".

It offers a nice set of guidelines to help you win any argument. Among them, of course, the obligatory advice to use "meaningless but weighty-sounding words and phrases" - like so:

Suppose you want to say: "Peruvians would like to order appetizers more often, but they don't have enough money."

You never win arguments talking like that. But you WILL win if you say: "Let me put it this way. In terms of appetizers vis-a-vis Peruvians qua Peruvians, they would like to order them more often, so to speak, but they do not have enough money per se, as it were. Q.E.D."

Only a fool would challenge that statement.

Other tips include "Drink liquor", "Make things up" (exact figures, whenever possible) and "Use snappy and irrelevant comebacks". And last but not least, the mother of them all:

Compare your opponent to Adolf Hitler.

This is your heavy artillery, for when your opponent is obviously right and you are spectacularly wrong. Bring Hitler up subtly. Say: "That sounds suspiciously like something Adolf Hitler might say" or "You certainly do remind me of Adolf Hitler."