Pedantry is an obsession with linguistic precision. It prizes form over style.
It is censorious of the supposed failings of others. None of these
characteristics is attractive. But as H. W. Fowler, the great lexicographer,
noted, pedantry is a relative term: “My pedantry is your scholarship, his
reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education and someone else’s
ignorance.”
Language is constantly changing, and a common form of change is decline.
Classics and modern languages are nothing like as widely studied as they
were in our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. There is inevitably less
appreciation of English vocabulary and grammar. The definition of pedantry
has shifted in the way that Fowler anticipated. What used to be standard
English is now often regarded as finicky. My pedantry is an insistence on
reasonable accuracy.
Once-common phrases, such as “to protest one’s innocence”, have become
incomprehensible. The useful word disinterested, meaning impartial, is now
widely used as a synonym for uninterested, presumably on the ground that it
sounds more refined. When you hear the phrase “there is no question that”
you need to guess from the context whether the speaker means (wrongly) “it
is certain that” or the opposite. All these linguistic changes involve a
loss.
So pedantry has pragmatism. There are many examples of terms that were devised
as insults but then enthusiastically adopted by the intended target.
Methodism was once a term of derision. Queer was adopted ironically by
campaigners for homosexual equality and robbed of its derogatory
connotation. The same approach is open to us. Pedant is not a term I choose,
but nor is it one that I any longer regard as the insult that is generally
intended: hence this column.
How did I reach this curmudgeonly state about language? It was how I grew up.
The family business is words. My grandfather, Adrian Bell, was a novelist
who compiled the first Times crossword, in 1930. He compiled several
thousand more till his death 50 years later and devised the plays on words
that became a distinctive feature of the puzzles.
My mother, Anthea Bell, translated the Asterix cartoons, among other works.
You cannot strictly translate a joke, or at least not one that will remain
funny; you need to devise a new one. The puns, allusions and Latin phrases
work because they are drawn from a common set of linguistic and cultural
references. Children who read Asterix may not see these but will learn from
them; adults can enjoy the stories at both levels.
My uncle, Martin Bell, ran a quixotic (meaning “indifferent to material
advance compared with honour”, not, as the word is commonly used,
“eccentric”) campaign for Parliament in 1997. Before that he was a
white-suited BBC correspondent with a distinctive broadcasting technique of
economical sentences. I learnt to speak in public from watching him. To gain
and retain an audience’s attention you must never use notes and never begin
a sentence without knowing how it’s going to end.
I gained appreciation of authors who used language precisely. Among those
whose work my grandfather pressed on me at an early age was P. G. Wodehouse,
of whom it has been well said (by Christopher Hitchens) that he was at once
omnivorous and discriminating in his reading. Wodehouse wrote such pearls as
Bertie Wooster’s observation of the mood of Bingo Little: “The brow was
furrowed, the eye lacked that hearty sparkle, and the general bearing and
demeanour were those of a body discovered after being several days in
water.” Read Wodehouse and you understand the difference between imagery and
cliché.
Pedants (if that is what we’re to be called) value language not out of a sense
of superiority but because the life of the mind is closed without it.
Language provides a shared stock of references and mode of communication.
Conventions in the use of language encourage clarity. There is no merit in
conformity for its own sake.
For example, more people complain about split infinitives than can explain
what is grammatically wrong with them. The reason is that there is nothing
wrong with a split infinitive except (usually) avoidable ugliness. Even then
there are exceptions: to boldly go is a more evocative phrase than to go
boldly, as anyone used to reading aloud would recognise. Similarly, the
widespread notion that a sentence should not end with a preposition is mere
superstition. There are many sentences in English that naturally end with a
preposition where it is part of a phrasal verb (to find out; to look up).
This column will deal with language and will prescribe usage. Language needs
its protectors because it is not infinitely malleable. Rapid change causes
much of the literature of the past to become obscure to modern readers. A
society with a diminished sense of its literary inheritance is inevitably
coarsened. The same goes for its understanding of history. If all that is
popularly known of thinkers and statesmen of the past is a range of
disembodied quotations shorn of context and accuracy, and which few trouble
to check, then this is worse than obtuse. It’s inexcusably careless.
The Pedant: quotations
When the relatives of the 29 people murdered at Omagh by the Real IRA in 1998
won an historic legal victory this month, they said they had been sustained
in their search for justice by the famous words of Edmund Burke: “All that
is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
No one would have been more admiring of the Omagh families than the late Conor
Cruise O’Brien. As an Irish cabinet minister in the 1970s O’Brien
tenaciously opposed Republican terrorism. He later wrote a fine biography of
Burke, The Great Melody. However, O’Brien’s book does not cite the “triumph
of evil” quotation. For this celebrated piece of political wisdom, the one
thing about Burke that everyone knows, is spurious. In the many forms in
which it appears, it includes no source.
One exception is noted in an excellent compendium of bogus quotations, They
Never Said It, by Paul Boller Jr and John George. The authors say that
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (14th ed, 1968) gave the “triumph of evil”
quotation and cited as source a letter from Burke to William Smith on
January 9, 1795. But the date is wrong and the letter in any event does not
contain those words.
Public commentary employs a stock of well-worn political quotations from
historical figures. When writers give no source, then it is likely that they
are retailing a quotation at second-hand. That matters, because failure to
question the provenance of a quotation is often accompanied by a failure to
examine the underlying principle. The “quotation” is the equivalent of a
cliché: it allows the writer’s mind to wander undisturbed along a
predetermined path.
The Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne recently concluded a tirade against “the
bloated welfare state” with what he called apposite words uttered by Cicero
in 55BC about the virtues of a balanced budget and the reduction of public
debt. The argument should be judged on its merits; but the quotation, much
favoured by conservative activists, is a hoary invention.
As Bertrand Russell observed (really): “The love of free inquiry and free
speculation has never been common. When it has existed, it has existed in
only a tiny minority . . .” A minuscule advance in that cause would be if
political commentators made a habit of checking their historical quotations.
