Proud to be a Pedant

From the March/April 2006 Bulletin:

Wandering the streets of Durham with Santa’s Sleigh, listening to his repeated announcements of our Rotary Club’s “Annual Christmas Appeal”, I started to think that something didn’t sound right.  Surely the conjunction  of “Annual” and “Christmas” was tautological?  Christmas is nothing if not Annual!  I put this to Santa (aka Alan Jose) and after some most un-Santa-like mutterings about pedantry, he modified his announcements.  But then my doubts set in.  Does the word Annual not apply to our Appeal?  And it need not be Annual.  Oh – the anguish we pedants have to suffer!

However, there are some pleasures.  I particularly enjoy hunting down itinerant and delinquent apostrophes.  The stress of a recent visit to Darlington Memorial Hospital was somewhat relieved when I was parking the car: the notice beside the Pay & Display machine informed me of the charges for stays of 2 hour’s, 3 hour’s, 4 hour’s and 24 hour’s!  My amazement at this profligate punctuation quite overcame my annoyance with the need to pay to visit a patient in hospital.  And – yes, it does matter; there is an important distinction between, for example, “the boys’ books” and “the boy’s books”.  Without that cursed comma sitting above its station how are we to know if “the boy” is singular or plural?

It’s not just punctuation and tautology, though; the misuse of words continues to haunt me.  I am always annoyed to be told that “your listening to Radio 4” or “your watching BBC2” – and this by the BBC who used to be the arbiter of all things correct in the use of language!  I can see right through those people in the “meeja” who talk of “transparency” when they really mean “visibility”.  And who or what has corrupted that perfectly innocent word “gay”?  I could (and sometimes do) go on!

Where does this pedantry come from?  I cannot honestly blame the fact that I (unfairly) failed my English Language ‘O’ Level examination at the first attempt and thus have some sort of inferiority complex.  Rather, I believe it is a result of spending most of my working life endeavouring to make computers do what I want them to do.  This is an activity where precision and accuracy are essential.  (There’s another example – never confuse precision with accuracy!)  In the development of computer software, misplaced pronunciation or a wrongly spelt word could add several zeroes to your gas bill, bring a space rocket crashing back to earth, or – more likely – cause me hours of tedious toil hunting down the “bug”.  But I shall reserve my moans about recalcitrant computers and so-called “artificial intelligence” for another day.

I am mindful of the proverb about people who live in glass houses, so if there are any grammatical, syntactical or any other sort of errors in this minor diatribe, please feel free to throw the stones back at me.  I am quite prepared to admit that I can make as many mistakes as anyone else – in spite of (or because of?) my efforts to communicate with precision and accuracy.

Eric Colling - March 2006