Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.
- Wilkie Collins
Your pedantry is boring the shit out of me.
Yes, you.
You know who you are, as do most people reading this thread, I suspect. If they are not sure, I'm talking about the people that, when you see them post, your heart immediately sinks, because you know they'll have bought up some minor, relatively unimportant (or even acknowledged) point, simply so they can pontificate endlessly on how it is incorrect.
Listen. No-one cares. Your condescending and smug attitude doesn't make you look like a brilliant and precise thinker, it makes you look petty and arrogant. And like a tosser, I guess.
If you and your friends were having a conversation in real life, and someone who joined in just kept on interrupting them constantly, not adding anything but only criticizing the use of certain words or details, you'd never want to get involved with another conversation with them again, right? I realise some of you don't actually have any friends in real life, and humbly suggest this might be the reason why. Anyway, for those of us not completely blind to social conventions, that comes across as pointlessly rude. No doubt someone here will try to object to the tyranny of social conventions, to which I have a simple reply: social conventions are what stop us from beating people like you over the head with a lead pipe, so be quiet and stop being so ungrateful.
There are, of course, times when a more correct definition can be useful, and aid understanding. However, most of you are never actually pedantic when that situation arises. Instead, you seem content to use your dreary methods as a weapon, smashing apart otherwise quite happy and pleasant conversations, because Accuracy Demands You Speak Up! Or you use it purposefully, to derail threads and conversations of people you do not like, acting as a spiteful child who hasn't the courage or the self-discipline to simply let others be.
If that were not enough, pedantry is also highly hypocritical. If the standards of the pedant were applied to all their utterances and off-the-cuff remarks, it would soon be obvious how incorrect they are, much of the time. That we don't do this to them in return for their distasteful ways is probably a mark of good character, or recognition that the pedant will always find excuses for their own slip-ups, while never acknowledging reasons given by others.
Pedantry though, really is a problem, and it is one I am seeing in more and more threads around the site. It's not clever, it is not amusing and all it does is make people less inclined to bother with posting - because if all you are going to get for your attempts to contribute is irrelevant and spurious nitpicking from condescending halfwits, why should you bother putting in the effort to write in the first place?
Loosen up. Allow people the right to get things wrong, if it is not a big issue. Don't get stuck on petty linguistic formalism - it's the most boring and uninteresting of all styles one could adopt. Or else, there is going to be nothing worth coming to this site to get pedantic about.
