This is dedicated to our own personal pedant. I do not even have to name the person. We all know who it is.
A Pedant’s Progress
Joseph Epstein for Commentary Magazine
A pedant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a person who is too concerned with small details or rules especially when learning or teaching.” For Webster’s Dictionary, he is “someone who annoys others by correcting small errors, caring too much about minor details, or emphasizing their own expertise especially in some narrow or boring subject matter.” For the Cambridge Dictionary, to be pedantic is to care “too much about unimportant rules or details and not enough about understanding or appreciating a subject.” A pedant is also someone who quotes from three different dictionaries to establish the meaning of a word—in other words, me.
Daily life generally offers this pedant a good workout. He calls his local library, and a robo-voice informs him that it “is now presently open.” Surely you mean “currently open,” he mutters into the phone. The play-by-play announcer for the Chicago Cubs says that “there’s two outs,” and the pedant mentally retorts, “There ‘are’ two outs, Schmuckowitz.” At the supermarket he gets in the express line, where he is greeted by a sign that reads, “Ten Items or Less,” and thinks, whatever happened to the more correct word “fewer?”
Please note that none of these items entails a direct confrontation. My pedantry is of the shy kind. I would never correct someone in person for his misusage, and I rarely go after authors whose books I have been asked to write about and in which I find such mistakes—though not long ago, writing about a history of nostalgia, I noted that two words the author of the book used (“musealization” and “pluritemporality”) I hoped never to have to see again. I have no wish to embarrass anyone for what I take to be his or her ineptness in the use of language, at least not directly.
I think, by contrast, of the late critic John Simon, who through a long career was unable to constrain his own rampant pedantry. His book reviews usually closed with a catalogue of grammatical and other errors he found in the book under review. He reviewed and lavishly praised three different books of mine. Of one, my book on snobbery, he ranked it with “works by Alexis de Tocqueville and Thorstein Veblen, except that it is more timely than the former and infinitely more amusing than the latter.” Yet in each of these reviews, he felt the need to take a paragraph or more to point out what he felt were errors and infelicities in my prose: my “intermittent sloppiness in matters of grammar, syntax, vocabulary and style.” He found my parallelisms faulty; we disagreed about the proper use of the word “comprise.” But, then, I, for my part, once wrote that John could find a grammatical error in a Stop sign.
Private or public, the pedant has a penchant for correctness. In his own speech and writing, he is pleased to observe the difference between “further” and “farther.” He is careful to observe the correct use of “shall” and “will.” He has a distrust of the self-congratulatory way that “empathy,” or imaginative sympathy, is used when people apply it to themselves. A grand day for him was the one on which he learned when correctly to use the preposition “between” and when to use “among”: between for two people, among for more than two. As in this last sentence, he does his best when possible to avoid splitting infinitives. Nor when possible does he end his sentences on prepositions, chiefly because prepositions aren’t strong words, and he has come to believe that sentences should begin and end on strong words. He is scrupulous in his use of the words “fulsome” and “enormity,” and he steers clear of “decimated.” All the while, he remains on the qui vive for others mistakenly using these words, breaking these rules. “Error, after all,” Theodore Dalrymple recently wrote in the English magazine the Critic, “is the joy of pedants.”
This pedant, as I say, keeps these matters to himself. He never corrects or puts down anyone for mistakenly using language. I did, however, have the opportunity to go public with some among them during my college teaching days. In a course called Advanced Prose Composition, taught to would-be writers, I used to write out on the blackboard the following sentence, “Hopefully, the professor will not be disinterested in the work in which I am presently engaged, which is rather unique,” and asked the students to find four errors in the sentence. Most couldn’t find any.
I pointed them out. “Hopefully” in the sentence is an adverb without a verb to modify; “disinterested” means impartial and is not the same as uninterested; “presently” means soon, not now or currently; and “unique,” like pregnancy, is an absolute, which ought never to be qualified (one can, I would explain, no more be rather unique than one can be rather pregnant). I then asked the students whether the meaning of the sentence, which was clear enough despite its errors, was in any serious way changed by these corrections. They agreed that it wasn’t. So why bother making the corrections? My answer was that it was wise to do so if only to spare the disdain of a small but often touchy minority group, the well-educated.
The only time I have been able to impose my pedantry upon a group larger than a room of 15 or 20 students was during the time (chiefly the 1970s and ’80s) when I edited the American Scholar, the intellectual quarterly of Phi Beta Kappa. First day on the job, I outlawed from the magazine’s pages a number of words or phrases popular at the time. Among them were “input” and “feedback,” which together always sounded to me a linguistic version of peristalsis. “Charisma” was not permitted to apply to anyone of lesser stature or influence than Gandhi or Jesus. “Lifestyle” was strictly verboten, so, too, weasel words such as “arguably” or “interestingly.” “Author” used as a verb, poof!, was gone; “supportive” was never allowed in the game. “Intriguing” was permitted only if it referred to spying or diplomacy, and “impact” exclusively to car crashes and dentistry. “Caring,” “sharing,” “growing,” “parenting,” “learning experience,” and other psychobabble words were excluded.
Not that any of this in any way affected the wider culture. Why, again, bother? I bothered because, like my fellow pedants of an earlier day, fellows named Jonathan Swift, William Hazlitt, George Orwell, and Kingsley Amis, I felt that, as a writer, I had a stake in doing what I could to preserve the vigor of the English language. Words of the kind I pointed out to my students and those I excluded from the pages of a magazine I edited, especially those used by people who mistakenly took themselves for educated, vitiated the language, often draining it of its substance, precision, potential poetry.
Change is in the nature, is at the very heart, of language, good change and bad. In the article “Worsened Words” in his book Modern English Usage, H. W. Fowler notes: “Changes in the meaning of words, and still more in their emotional content, often reflect changes of opinion about the value of what they stand for.” Fowler cites among his examples “imperialism,” which was “defined at the end of the 19th c. as ‘a greater pride in empire, a larger patriotism’; in the middle of the 20th it was described as a word so charged with hostile meaning as to become almost useless.”
Every 10 or 15 years in America, a large number of useful words depart the language and a rash (I use the dermatological term deliberately) of new ones appears. “Tipping point” leaves to be replaced by “inflection point”; goodbye “outlier,” hello “incentivize.” Our politicians and pundits especially go in for the newest of what Fowler called “vogue words,” of which he wrote: “Ready acceptance of vogue words seems to some people the sign of an alert mind; to others it stands for the herd instinct and lack of individuality.” I am, of course, one of those others. “Dynamic” is such a word. “This changes ‘the dynamic’; that alters the old ‘dynamic’; a whole new ‘dynamic’ would of course then be required.” Yeah, sure, right, Senator.
Among the vogue words brought into the game in recent years, several come from the arts. “Surreal” is now used to mean almost anything odd or unexpected, the least out of the ordinary. “It was ‘surreal,’” a woman on television news might say about her auto accident. Another is “icon,” with anyone who has acquired the least bit of fame now crowned by the word “iconic.” Then there is “scenario,” which has been brought in presumably to elevate the simpler word “plan.” False philosophy has lent the language the word “existential,” with nearly every threat—from climate change to the most recent Supreme Court decision—thought existential. Let us not forget the new use of “fun,” changed from noun to adjective, as in “fun couple,” “fun time,” “so fun.”
“Incredible” in recent years has had a workout that is in itself, you might say, incredible. Donald Trump uses the word in nearly every second sentence he utters. Joe Biden, on the other, slightly tremulous hand, begins a great many of his sentences with the word “Look,” often adds “here’s the deal,” notes “this isn’t hyperbole,” and closes by muttering, sotto voce, “and I’m not kidding.”
The word “massive,” formerly reserved to describe mountains and skyscrapers, is now used to describe everything from boredom to prestige. The formerly overused “focus” has been pumped up, without much improvement, to “laser focus,” as “problem” has become “problematic.” The word “problem” itself has more and more been supplanted by “issue,” while issue no longer has the useful meaning of a subject in the flux of controversy but is used to refer to one’s elbow or hamstring or mental “issues.” The philosophical term “begs the question” is almost everywhere misused to mean calls up or suggests the question. “Impact” has become a touch uglier with the “ful” suffix turning it into “impactful.” Remove the phrase “in terms of” and many academics would be deprived of speech. “Life” itself has been all but banished, replaced by that grand cliche “journey.” “Awesome,” you might say. Or, better perhaps, “Whatever!”
Among its other valuable essential services, language allows us to make distinctions. For a contemporary example, it matters whether we think Donald Trump “crude” or “coarse,” or whether Joe Biden is undergoing “senility” or “dementia.” In the first instance, crudity goes to upbringing and education, coarseness to character; in the second, senility can be a natural part of aging, dementia a deeper deficit of mental ability. The distinction in our judgment of both men is crucial.
A recent, small volume by Eli Burnstein called Dictionary of Fine Distinctions, Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning has appeared, from which I have acquired knowledge of a number of distinctions previously unknown to me. I hadn’t known about the distinction between “venomous” and “poisonous”: Something is poisonous when you bite it, venomous when it bites you. The distinction between “shame” and “guilt” is also valuable: One feels shame for not being good enough, guilty for not having done the right thing. The distinction between “rational” and “reasonable,” with the former being logical, the latter sensible, is another useful distinction nicely formulated by Burnstein.
Among the book’s more useful distinctions are those between “assume” and “presume”; “ethics” and “morality”; “autocrat” and “despot”; “strategy” and “tactics,” “tyrant” and “dictator”; and “epigram,” “aphorism,” “maxim,” “adage,” and “proverb.” On a more mundane level, we learn that the difference between “sorbet” and “sherbert” is that the first is nondairy in its content; we also learn the difference among “club soda,” “sparkling water,” and “seltzer”; and the evolving difference between “dinner” and “supper.” City-dwellers will discover that the distinction between “straw” and “hay” is that animals eat the latter, sleep on the former.
A few of Burnstein’s distinctions are arguable or feel inadequately skimpy: that between “kitsch” and “camp,” or between “kink” and “fetish.” A few others—that between “snitch” and “rat,” “flotsam” and “jetsam”—feel, as the philosophers say, distinctions without a difference. And yet a few others unnecessary: that between “irony” and “sarcasm,” “modernity” and “modernism.” I’m pleased to report that the distinction between Walter Pater and Walter Payton is not included in the book.
When did my pedantry first kick in? Rather late in life, it turns out. In grade school, the notion of grammar as a form of order and of logic was lost on me. Diagramming sentences was distinctly not my idea of a good time. Punctuation, too, sailed on past me. The only punctuation I was confident about was that sentences began on capital letters and ended on periods. As a high-school student I wrote defensively, that is, not to discover beauties or amusement in the language, but in the hope of avoiding errors. But, then, for me, the classroom was always the place I learned least. I have long since come to feel that one is likely to learn a great deal more as a teacher than as a student.
I first acquired a sense of the value of grammar and the rich possibilities of the use of punctuation through reading in my college years and later. I cannot say with exactitude when the ideal of stylish prose became my own ideal. I began publishing fairly young (my first article in a magazine was at 22) and much of my early writing was highly imitative of the mélange of writers I admired.
I discovered that I might not be able to bring order to my life, but I could try to do so to a reasonable extent to my writing. Through the offices of good grammar, carefully manipulated syntax, words weighed with precision and placed with care, correct writing came to have an elegance of its own. Sloppy writing I came to think misguided, wrong, even a betrayal of sorts. What was betrayed was the integrity inherent in language.
Full pedantry did not come all at once. While in the peacetime Army, I wrote articles for the post newspaper at Fort Hood, Texas. But my first jobs out of the Army were editing, one of them, for the socialist, anti-Communist magazine called the New Leader. In that day, the early 1960s, several of the magazine’s contributors were Europeans. English was their third or fourth language, and their writing called for fairly heavy editing. Reinhold Niebuhr, who had recently had a stroke, also then wrote for theNew Leader, in what I can only describe as stroke-torn prose, every sentence of which seemed to offer three multiple-choice possibilities. Editing these and other writers gave me a sense of how English prose works and what is required to keep it on track.
Editing soon became an intellectual tic of sorts. I began to edit even as I read for pleasure. The difference between the way a normal person reads and a writer reads is that the latter asks two questions of his reading that the normal reader does not: First, how can this be improved, and, second, what in this can I appropriate (also known as steal) for my own writing? Reading and writing, in other words, for me became nearly coterminous. And so things have remained.
I have written and published millions of words, have taught about words, have edited hundreds of thousands of other writers’ words. Words are all I know. They are my inventory, my business, my life. Because they are, I feel it my right, my duty even, to protect them, calling out their misuse, decrying their loss, protecting them from the thick-fingered ineptness of the overly confident semi-educated. So there I am, a pedant, full-blown and proud of it.