SUE DE GROOT | Nastey? Were no such thing. Lets give you a sneak peak into our nicity

Is it possible to be a pedant and at the same time be a pleasant person? I would have said “a nice person”, but as anyone who pays attention to this column knows, “nice” originally meant “stupid” in English, so let’s not go there.

Getting back to the question, however, some think a pleasant pedant is as mythical a creature as a sheep who can knit. And let’s face it, pedants can be wolves in sheep’s clothing.

They lie there all meekly and pretend not to be bothered about the misuse and abuse of words, biting their long red tongues with sharp, pointy teeth when tempted to attack passers-by who confuse “loose” with “lose” or “weary” with “wary”.

Pedants have their limits, however. Tickle a resting pedant’s mutton-chop whiskers with an “inquiry” that should be an “enquiry” and watch how they come apart at the seams (not seems). Most pedants are cut from the same fragile cloth, and they snap easily.

There are many ways to penetrate a pedant’s disguise. One of these is to put the word “only” in the wrong position in a sentence. Say “I only wear my hat on Sundays” and a pedant will reply: “Does the priest not object when you walk into church wearing nothing but your hat?”

Back to the question of whether such annoying pedants can also be kind, a study by psychologists at the University of Michigan in the US concluded that we (I mean they) are actually rather nasty.

The point of this laborious and long-winded study was to compare the personality traits of people who could’nt be bothered about putting an apostrophe in the correct 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. Still, I have never considered my low error tolerance to be an indication that I am a terrible human being, but perhaps I’m wrong.

The psychologists 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.” Grammos? Is that the grandmother of all typos?

The researchers might not agree, but it sounds to me as if they’re saying that 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.

The results of this study seem to me to be unfairly pejorative. Pedants are demonised enough without being beaten over the head with a ream of pseudoscientific statistics.

OK, 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, instead of its pizzas. 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 — about R15 — 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 the researchers 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 non-lunch-providing, 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!