Pedantry Rules Totally Correctly
Last week I received a review of the National Youth Theatre’s White Boy at the Soho from our reviewer Rachel Sheridan. In her accompanying email, she pointed out - horror of horrors! - that they actually call it the soho theatre. No capitalisation!
Now I know this is the modern way - playwright debbie tucker green, for example, wants to be called just that, without any capitalisation - and I also know that, in most editions of his work, the poet E. E, Cummings is known as e. e. cummings (although, according to Wikipedia, he did say that he he preferred the capitalized version), but I am a proud pedant and insist upon capitalisation (notice the “s” there, unlike the American “z” in the quote for Wikipedia).
Does that sound petty? I suppose it does and, if I restricted myself to so minor a pedantry, it would be, but (notice the Oxford comma!) I really do think language and the way we write it matter. We live in a visually very sophisticated society, which is a good thing because it means that we have become skilled at reading visual messages, but, at the same time, we seem to be in danger of becoming desensitised to language, and that is dangerous.
Why is it dangerous? Because the less complex the language we can use, the less complex the concepts and thoughts we can process.
You don’t believe that? Someone told me the other day that he is distinterested in… well, the subject doesn’t matter. He actually meant that he is not interested in it, that he is uninterested. It appears that now those two very distinct and useful words, uniterested and disinterested, have lost their very distinct meanings and have become synonyms. Thus we have lost a very useful word. How soon before the concept of disinterestedness is lost? Come to think of it, there are some who will say it already has been, with people looking first and foremost at “what’s in it for me?”
Now I am not advocating the return to the florid language of times past, nor to the obfuscations of legalese (or any other jargon, for that matter), but sloppy language leads to slopping thinking and slopping thinking leads to errors and confusion.
I probably go too far in the opposite direction - even when texting I will use capitals and proper punctuation: God forbis that I should ever write “c u 2nite”! - and I often delay (sometimes for hours) getting one of my own reviews online because I am searching for exactly the right word.
And it is so easy to lose the appreciation for beautiful language. When Shakespeare sounds like a foreign language and the reaction to passages from the King James Bible is “eh?”, then we are in deep linguistic trouble. Of course language must change and develop, and its natural direction is towards greater simplicity - the loss of inflection being a prime example - but far too many changes in modern English are the result of ignorance. Witness the “grocer’s apostrophe”, where an apostrophe is added to every plural - potato’s , apple’s and so on - as inflection is so far in the past that people do not recognise that ’s is a replacement for the old genitive.
But I am wandering too far! I simply insist that a little pedantry is a good thing!