In terms of energy consumption, pedantry is an outrage. It could be defined as an inflammation of language in which a lot of resources are invested in saying quite little, sometimes even nothing. There is a total inadequacy between what is there to communicate and the tools to do it, like using a shovel to eat a peanut: so more often than not, when the peanut happens to exist, it ends up in the floor.
It is also similar to (extreme) bodybuilding in being a muscular demonstration without any purpose but the demonstration itself. They both also share that implicit belief, primitive and contrary to evidence, but childish in a way that is almost touching, that bigger (bloated, oversized) means stronger.
Nevertheless, and in spite of its proven inefficiency, this kind of “speech inflammation” is very popular in all nations and professions, both in its written and oral modalities: a writer can be pedant. A doctor can be pedant. A politician is usually pedant. Why is that? Which could be the hidden needs and desires behind this kind of (needless) parades of words? Could it be a peacock-like strategy, people with strong language skills going a little too far in displaying them? But, at the same time, a person with language skills will always be the first to admit the value of concision, silence and rhythm in speech, the importance of the ‘less is plus’ paradigm. You cannot measure good language skills in words per square meter, and the owner of language skills is not usually pedantic at all, he is too busy trying to convey ideas to get stuck with words.
Sadly, I think pedantry is more similar to squid ink: it allows to hide oneself behind a wall of words. To hide what? One’s own ignorance, for example. Or the lack of an actual content. Take business world, for example. We’ll find scarce surprises in a press release on a merger of companies: numbers are the steak, words only garnish it. There are even certain other occasions, in which such lack of content is a must. Institutional speeches or public ceremonies must be ‘garnished’ too: all they require is an abstract sensation of satisfaction and agreement among the attendants, and everything that diverts from that must be carefully avoided.
I am not defending a droid-like language here. Adopting the opposite extent would be just as bad. I’m asking for a tight language, a language that fits its purpose. Numbers are always the same, onetwothree etc, but you don’t use them in the same way to communicate a phone number and to play with a baby’s fingers… Anyone who regularly reads this blog will know how much I like similes and digressive humor. But they are always subordinated to a purpose, to a certain content that I intend to communicate in the most effective (i.e. human) way. I don’t write to show off my adverbs or synonyms (I think some people do), but I don’t reject them either when they visit me (which would be a case of ‘reverse pedantry’).
My general language policy is that it is better to start with a general intention to say something, in the hope that, along your journey towards expression, you’ll go through beautiful landscapes, than doing it on the opposite sense: trying to speak pretty, in the desperate, quite unlikely hope that, once exhaustion catches you, your audience or the dictionary, the whole thing will have a meaning somehow. Language is quite a mysterious thing, on one hand it is a tool, but on the other it is an independent alive entity and it treats us in the same way as we treat it. To finish with another simile, I think the first option would be like riding a powerful black horse (you know, that flow sensation, you even forget that words exist). The second would be more like having the horse stuffed and then walk around pushing it. Gee up! Don’t I look magnificent?
Will we ever be free from pedantry? What does it take? What kind of pedantry is the most unbearable to you? Which are your favorite pedantic clichés?
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