Everyday Pedantry

How pedantic should we be about the language use we stumble across in our everyday lives? Taking a look at the letters page in the newspapers on almost any day of the week demonstrates that even the slightest misdemeanour in language gets complained about, whether this is an older person complaining about the ‘youth’ speak of today, or someone picking up the tiniest detail in a news article.

Examples include the correct use of a word and when it should be used. And of course, the dreaded apostrophe. When to use ‘who’ and ‘whom’ is one that frequently rears its head, I am not going to go into definitions here but there are those who know exactly the difference and those who wouldn’t have the slightest clue. The question that we must ask ourselves is does it matter? Often one can get a sense of the correct usage simply but vocalising the sentence and listening to which one makes the most sense. But if someone gets it wrong it hardly matters, does it? After all, there is no doubt that these words could be used interchangeably and the reader will fully understand what the writer is saying every time.

The apostrophe. Some local councils in the UK have taken to not including it on street signs whatsoever. A blanket policy, which makes it clear that no matter the meaning or the different intonations that there could be from such an exclusion, it is stating this is the way it does things.

The Times has a pedant’s column, I often wonder if this is written tongue in cheek or not. I like to think it is, taking a small but necessary poke at how ridiculous such pedantry can be, highlighted in deeply analysed detail.

Has the word ‘pedant’ come to construe negative connotations? I certainly think that it is at least edging this way. We tend to use the word now to describe someone who is overly fussy and enjoys picking out the slightest details of other’s mistakes, often with a definite touch of schadenfreude.

I have written in this blog before that language does and must evolve and there is little we can do to stop such positive progress. Does this mean that we must tolerate the incessant whinging of those who seem to have nothing better to do than take the time and effort to write into a publication? In a tolerant society I guess that we must, safe in the knowledge that they are kicking the wall while spelling, semantics, punctuation and grammar changes around them.