Pedants ARE nice people, no matter what researchers say

24 April 2016 - 02:00 By SUE DE GROOT

Is it possible to be a pedant and a pleasant person? Not according to an academic study published last month by Julie Boland and Robin Queen of the University of Michigan's psychology department. The point of their laborious and long-winded exercise was to compare the personality traits of people who could'nt be bothered about an apostrophe in the wrong place with the psychological attributes of those who react violently to written errors.As one of the latter, I can tell you that we pedants may not commit any outward acts of savagery when confronted with "less" instead of "fewer", but trust me there's an imaginary assault taking place inside our heads. I have never considered my low error tolerance to be an indication that I am a terrible human being, but perhaps I'm wrong.story_article_left1Boland and Queen summarised their findings as follows: "More extroverted people were likely to overlook written errors that would cause introverted people to judge the person who makes such errors more negatively. Less agreeable people were more sensitive to grammos... less open people were sensitive to typos."The researchers might not agree with my interpretation, but it sounds to me as if they're saying anyone who cares about spelling and grammar is a sad, lonely loser who hates people and would like nothing better than to live in a hermetically sealed dictionary.This is not the only recent academic report to have annoyed me. (Actually, most academic reports annoy me because they are all far longer than they need to be, but that's beside the point.) Another heavily footnoted thesis proudly announced that after intensive empirical research the authors had discovered that obese penguins were more likely to fall than their slimmer colleagues when both were made to run on a treadmill.The appropriate response to this, if you'll forgive a colloquialism, is: "Duh!" Pronounced as two syllables (du-uh), this is useful shorthand when you have neither the time nor energy to say: "Well that's perfectly obvious, isn't it? Any moron could have told you the answer before you wasted expensive academic resources on idiotic experiments."The pedants picked on in the Boland-Queen study might not have been as humiliated as the poor penguins, but the results seem to me to be unfairly pejorative. Pedants are demonised enough without being beaten over the head with a ream of pseudo-scientific statistics.story_article_right2OK, so maybe we don't like it when we are offered a "sneak peak" instead of a sneak peek. Perhaps we stab the table with a fork when a restaurant menu tells us how cheesy its "pizza's" are. It is possible that we grind our teeth when breath is "baited" instead of bated. That doesn't mean we jump queues, ignore red traffic lights or turn a blind eye to people and animals in distress. We are not unpleasant individuals. Are we?I'm trying to be nice here, but really, how can a study conducted on 83 volunteers (who were paid $1 each for their pains) be extrapolated to the entire reading population? If those subjects who were most judgmental about grammatical errors happened to be the same ones who rated poorly on the pleasant-personality scale, well, maybe there was a reason for this.Perhaps they were stuck in traffic on the way to the venue. Perhaps they had just received some bad news, or perhaps they were hungry. A dollar, after all, is not going to buy you much by way of lunch. Perhaps Boland and Quinn (which sounds like a folk-singing duo with tambourines) should have provided egg mayonnaise sandwiches and made sure the hall was properly heated.See how generous and open-minded we pedants can be? I'm giving these tambourine-touting unlunch-paying footnote-writing academics an out here. All they have to do is admit they were wrong and publish a retraction saying they deeply regret ever suggesting that those of us who care about language are thoroughly unlikeable, and all will be forgiven. We are not mean, nasty, awful people. We're NICE, dammit!E-mail your observations on words and language to Sue de Groot on degroots@sundaytimes.co.za or follow her on Twitter @deGrootS1...

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