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I'm with Jack on this one. When somebody else does it, it's pedantry, when you do it it's pellucidity.
"Pedantry" is also one of those easily-thrown accusations, like the ever-popular "rhetoric" or "hypocrisy", that can be used as an emotional sound effect largely divorced from its meaning - that is, when one says "you're being pedantic", one is saying "I do not like the way this is going/this sort of discussion/you". Since it is largely a subjective term, it's very hard to defend either the accusation or the accused.
Where an accusation of pedantry is often more demonstrably valid is where it is pulling a discussion away from its subject. For example, one could argue that in the Hutton Inquiry the niceness of the distinctions being drawn are attempts to drag the line of questioning away into a discussion of the difference between "sexing up" and "presentational analysis" rather than into the actual facts of what happened.
However. The Hutton Inquiry also highlights one of the important aspects of what can be identified as pedantry. Being arguably pedantic, I would offer that Webster, the dictionary Bartleby appears to have consulted, is not a terribly good source; the Concise Oxford offers as a primary definition of "pedant" a person who insists on strict adherence to formal rules or literal meaning at the expense of a wider view. In the case of the Inquiry, and of law in general, there are a set of formal rules which have accreted and grown massive over time with precisely the aim of locking down literal meaning. In those terms, for example, it becomes terribly important whether what happened could be described as "sexing up", because if it can the BBC was justified in supporting Gilligan's report and if it cannot then Gilligan's report should not have been stood by. One might note further that the discussion largely fails to take into account the fact that the term was used, IIRC, in a brief statement at the beginning of the Today programme and had been dropped by the time the main report was delivered - thus, by insisting on it as the locus of its complaint, the government was failing to address the wider view of how the event was reported. Since people's careers (and in one case so far, people's lives) are hanging on these questions, however, a degree of obsessive precision in definition seems necessary and desirable - just as a distinction between murder and manslaughter, although the victim remains as dead, has significant repercussions outside the act of definition itself.
Which means, probably, that pedantry, as defined, is *designed* to be a bad thing - nobody has ever been called a pedant with admiration, to my admittedly limited knowledge - the sort of scrupulous examination often accused of being pedantic may or may not be; the problem is, it is rather hard to identify with a neutral eye what is or is not pedantry and what nice, neat and ultimately necessary distinction.
Personally and generally, if somebody seems to me to be being pedantic, I try to assume that I do not yet understand where they are going or what point they are making, and see where it goes. The temptation not to do this when an opinion is not one's own, and thus the path murky, is of course often great. That comes down to how far one is ready to trust other people, and how much or little one feels a statement or argument should admit of scrutiny. |
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