
Pedantry isn't boring – it's essential - blasdel
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/03/david-mitchell-english-language-grammar
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telemachos
Some kinds of pedantry may be useful (probably not ever really 'essential' to
be pedantic about _that_ word), but linguistic prescriptivism is just tedious.
The whole activity depends on a fundamental misunderstanding of language. The
schoolmarmish desire to wag your finger at the way someone else speaks or
writes is almost never successful and generally just a symptom cranky
nostalgia and a false sense of superiority.

There are perfectly good reasons to draw artificial lines around types of
language use (formal critical or analytic writing, an email to a friend, a
tweet, a code comment). And _in such a context_ , we can make useful
recommendations. Good writing teachers will qualify their advice exactly this
way. That is, "In formal writing, don't use 'ain't'" rather than "There is no
such word as 'ain't'." But blathering on about what _is_ or _is not_ good
language without qualification is a colossal waste of time and energy.

The funny thing to me is that most of the people who are really into this sort
of thing are such mediocre writers. I suspect it's because they have very
limited imaginations.

(Final edit: the bit at the end about 'hopefully' is a complete myth, and it's
very well known that it's a myth. People who complain about 'hopefully' or
split infinitives in English pretty much prove that they are just cranks. A
citation, pretty much picked at random:
[http://writingguide.geneseo.edu/?pg=topics/myths.html#hopefu...](http://writingguide.geneseo.edu/?pg=topics/myths.html#hopefully))

~~~
xiaoma
Tarring people who disagree with you as being mediocre writers or having
limited imagination doesn't really encourage a very good discussion.

Personally, I find poor grammar grating. Yes, I _can_ understand what people
mean when they make mistakes with its/it's, there/their/they're, there's/there
are, your/you're, lesser/fewer, etc...

It's not something I celebrate, though.

~~~
telemachos
I admit that the crack about mediocre writing was unhelpful. Also, my whole
post was too long. This topic gets under my skin.

Beyond that, I would say that many of the things prescriptivists discuss are
_not_ grammatical mistakes. They are often disagreements about usage where
reasonable people can disagree, but more importantly many of them are
literally myths. That is, many of these so-called rules have never had good
support in English usage or etymology or linguistics. In many cases, they are
just usages that bothered someone in the 19th or 20th century who made a lot
of noise. (For some discussion, browse through the hits to this search:
<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5> or here:
[http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/national-
gr...](http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/national-grammar-
day-2009-ten-common-grammar-myths-debunked/) )

For what it's worth, I find poor usage and poor grammar very grating as well.
My point wasn't that we should celebrate it, but that cranky rants aren't good
ways to deal with bad writing or speech. It helps to write well. It helps to
recommend good writing. It helps to point out to people why one way of putting
something might be more effective than another. But the Andy Rooney style of
complaining (which, I'm sorry, I thought the article belonged to) isn't
helpful.

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julius_geezer
Writing is choosing. You are continually making judgments about words, not
least how your audience will read them. Is "nice" the neutral commendation of
baby boomer's youth, the "finicky" of a couple of centuries before (Should any
youth, worth making drunk, prove nice ...) or ironic term met since. A lot of
new words and usages are not worth saving. In my high school days "hairy" was
a general purpose intensive adjective (a big hairy
knife/wrench/textbook/whatever), and at 14 I'd have thought well of myself for
working it twice into a paragraph. How would that read now.

------
wglb
_The stickler-advocated rules of spelling, grammar and punctuation slow the
speed of change and allow the language to remain united._ : Poppycock. Wishful
thinking will not influence the direction that language, particularly English,
goes. The battle about whether or not to use an apostrophe before a trailing
"s" is about four hundred years old. The word "ain't", despite excessive
pedantry, has been in regular use for at least 100 years.

And it doesn't help to try to fit Latin rules on English. This just exposes
the narrow world view of the pedants.

