Bad luck... you know you're a genuine debater if:

* You watch the news with your flatmates just so you can start arguments about current affairs.

* You take the word ‘onus’ much, much too seriously.

* You’ve had your shafting technique commended by an independent adjudicator.

* You asked your ex for their ‘criteria’ when they said they’d decided to dump you…

* …Their reply was “You argue too much and you’re always drunk”…

* …and you then you asked them for their causal links.

* You consider karaoke to be a normal and legitimate way to pass the time.

* You’ve been asked to “show your split more clearly.”

* You address four of your friends as “Ladies and Gentlemen”…

* …at least five times every minute.

* You don’t see the problem in saying that “us” can mean “Eskimos, women, and/or the elderly” when it suits you.

* You consider 22-year-olds to be both ‘old’ and ‘crusty’…

* ...but you score them anyway.

* The Easter Bunny didn’t visit you last Easter, because at the time you were off your face, staggering around an unfamiliar city smashing mirrors and singing Cat Stevens tunes with people you’d met that afternoon.

* You think that the word “Squirrel” is a verb.

* You don’t have dinner on Tuesdays because “eating is cheating”.

* You don’t think it’s a real restaurant unless they’d at least let you BYO a crate of Tui.

* You know that “short, witty, and to the point” describes more than just Bart Simpson.

* When normal people hear someone say “Massey”, they just think of sheep. But you think of Remus first. But then you think of sheep anyway. And then somehow you end up thinking about Remus and sheep. So then you just stop thinking.

* You know all of the social, economic, environmental and political ramifications of deforestation, but you couldn’t cut a tree down, or even trim a hedge, to save yourself.

* No matter what someone says, you make whatever it was sound really stupid – just because you can.

* You know that it’s never ‘stealing’, because it’s ‘borrowing’. Or ‘liberating’. Or ‘souveniring’. Or whatever.

* When someone sees you in your Easters hoodie and ask you what sport you play, you instinctively say something cool, like "Rugby League" and enter into a diatribe about the merits of the 40/20 rule.