There’s a cute little hypothetical question that everyone has heard, and somehow it’s popularly believed that the answer to this question can neatly summarize a person’s outlook.

Is the glass half empty or half full?

Of course when someone is asked this question the answer is going to be chosen to match their own self opinion, so someone who considers themselves an optimist will answer half-full, a pessimist half-empty, and prickly bastards like myself will get annoyed and simply refuse to answer the question.

A half-empty glass implies that you have just drunk the other half, which to me sounds like a positive thing. A half-full glass implies that someone is too stingy to pour you a whole glass, which sounds like a negative thing. Without understanding more about the context it’s impossible to give a truly meaningful answer to this question, except in that answering the question at all you are confirming your support for a fatuous world-view that really gets my hackles up.