Sounds like he tried to build an academic career on pathological grammar Nazism. The size of a dot? Come on, that's at most a minor typographical error.
A text the size of "Ulysses" cannot, by definition, ever be "perfect". There will always be an opportunity for a vacuous hack to assemble a "catastrophic" collection of minor mistakes that allegedly compromise the edition. This is usually much easier than actually producing a new edition, by orders of magnitude so, and this is why we hate grammar Nazis: they derail the conversation and in the end contribute nothing of substance.
I know it's probably harsh, but every field has these guys, they should not be celebrated but marginalized. I find his ouster from academia not surprising. Kidd is obviously very competent but he chose to invest his vast knowledge and intellect into an ego match instead of contributing and expanding his field.
There seems to be an important difference between everyday "Grammar nazism" and an effort to generate an accurate proof copy of a -- maybe THE - defining English language modernist novel.....Textual criticism, in general, is very important for the transmission of culture, and a different kind of thing than people who go around feeling superior because they still use "whom" in the "right" place.
Of course, it was a metaphor that fit nicely. That is to say, academia has vacuous researchers that are to science what grammarians are to casual online discussions.
A text the size of "Ulysses" cannot, by definition, ever be "perfect". There will always be an opportunity for a vacuous hack to assemble a "catastrophic" collection of minor mistakes that allegedly compromise the edition. This is usually much easier than actually producing a new edition, by orders of magnitude so, and this is why we hate grammar Nazis: they derail the conversation and in the end contribute nothing of substance.
I know it's probably harsh, but every field has these guys, they should not be celebrated but marginalized. I find his ouster from academia not surprising. Kidd is obviously very competent but he chose to invest his vast knowledge and intellect into an ego match instead of contributing and expanding his field.