Stephen Fry on language pedants

[sjw]

[Starbuckle]

Interesting. Fry has a point, but he seems to conflate pedantry with conscientious attention to clarity and precision in linguistic expression, and to conflate true errors of expression with false ones (i.e., the lament about ending a sentence on a preposition, which is often idiomatic and appropriate to do in English, notwithstanding the arbitrary counseling against it in some circles). I can't be as dismayed as Fry would presumbably be that the author of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" pays an "excess" of "pedantic" attention to where the commas and apostrophes are going in road signs and letters to the editor. One will be cured of such aversion to detail if one spends any sustained amount of time copy-editing student papers, as I did for several months for an editorial service. The problem is that the details add up; it's not just a matter always of one suspected blunder in an otherwise fine and intelligible communication. Maybe there's a reasonable alternative to both dogmatic pedantry and let-the-commas-fall-where-they-may-ism.

Edited October 25, 2010 by Starbuckle