Language rules prop up culture

Pedantry just sounds authoritarian and prescriptive. But no one decries strict architecture; strictness in this realm makes for magnificence and safety. And that's all pedantry is: insisting on the architecture of the language being respected so that meaning can be preserved and conveyed.

The dictionary definitions are not kind, saying that pedants overrate book-learning or technical knowledge, without flexibility or discrimination. I would like to change that negative definition, to claim back a role for people who care about how English is used and are not afraid to say so.

There is something else as well. It is not universally important, but it is important to me, and I know I am not alone in this. Beautifully written, grammatically correct prose is a pure joy to read.

There, I've admitted it: I do have a selfish motive. I prefer to read magnificent English. It is so much better and richer than its alternative. I don't have to feel let down when the possessive pronoun "its" has been given a gratuitous apostrophe. I don't have to cringe at the language atrocity of dangling participles that sees nonsense being accepted as near enough.

I don't have to endure prepositions being used interchangeably, or the hideously overused "inappropriate" in every second sentence, or reading yet again about an Australian icon, or be told that there are myriads of fish in the ocean, as if that beautiful adjective were some quantity.

I can just relax and read, and let the meaning flow unimpeded into my mind, to be savoured for its own sake. It is not only pedants who appreciate beautiful writing but I bet that it is pedants who feel most relieved and grateful when they find it.

I have no doubt that a gimlet-eyed pedant hater will be combing through my text looking for errors and misuses to point out. This is what people who hate pedants often do, turn the guns back on the aggressor; blast the smirk off the smartypants. Almost certainly they will find the odd misplaced comma or a less than graceful phrase, or an expression verging on overused. That's fine. It's desirable for writers to cultivate humility. No writer, no matter how well versed in the language or how determined, can hope to write perfect prose. It is a doomed venture, and the unhappiest of the cardigan-wearing pedants are those who inevitably fail and then beat themselves into abject depression.

The better way is to observe what the counter-pedants find and learn from it; the other person may have a point and it is worth knowing it. At least there are then two people in the world who are looking closely at the language and evaluating its correctness, and surely that is a good thing.