In defense of pedants, plus some good news

Pedants get a bad rep. I don’t need to go into the details of why. We’re all well aware of their modus operandi. When you’re in a group of them, speaking can become stressful. You can see them paying attention to how you’re saying things instead of to what you’re saying. I was once in a lecture where the public was made up mostly of translators, the ultimate pedants because they can nitpick in at least two languages. They were all listening attentively until the speaker made a horrible grammatical gaffe and lost them all. After a while, they all managed to soothe their sore brains back to attention, but a few minutes later the speaker made another mistake and that was that for the lecture. I remember it was about journalism, but not much more beyond that.

As you may have guessed, I was one of the translators whose brain was turned upside down and inside out and back to front. I am a pedant. There, I said it. It has always been my inescapable destiny: it runs in my genes, I was raised as one and now my day job involves being one. I apologise profusely to whomever I have corrected, and just as profusely to those people that I’m certain I’m going to be correcting in the future.

I would, nevertheless, like to offer up a defence of pedants: we suffer as much as you do. I never shorten my phone messages with ‘u’ or ‘k’ or ‘ty’; I write ‘you’ and ‘fine’ and ‘thank you’, so my messages are always long. I still remember spelling mistakes I made when I was learning how to read and write, and they still sting. I don’t enjoy seeing commas out of place, and it bothers me that it bothers me. This sentence that you have just read bothers me as well: it is not clear, with the use of two ‘bothers’ next to each other and I’m not convinced it sounds nice. I’m not going to change it, though. I’m going to be strong and leave it there. Resilience through pain, I guess. I hope. It’s no fun to go through life wanting to correct the punctuation on restaurant signs. I don’t carry a piece of chalk and a felt-tip pen around with me, at least not any more. Being at work is a liberation because I can let go and indulge in my compulsion. Pedants are like people with perfect pitch or professional food tasters: they cannot enjoy music or food in the same way as other mortals because their minds are always analysing what could be improved. Furthermore, it’s annoyingly not something that can be switched off.

This is all a roundabout way of introducing the announcement: my book has arrived! I have just received the courtesy copies. Normally, this would be a cause for celebration, but my pedantic nature was having none of it. Opening the box, holding the book in front of my face and opening my eyes was hard: what if there was a typo on the cover? Imagine my name had been misspelt! How would I have lived with the agony? I don’t think I could have. The introductory paragraphs of this entry should provide an explanation as to why. I would have carried that pain to my deathbed, which would have come a few years earlier.

I’m happy to report that there were no mistakes. I haven’t looked inside the book, though. I’m not going to do it unless I’m forced at gunpoint and after several hours of torture. I have also received some bookmarks, postcards and posters, all of them really snazzy. As I held the book in my hand I felt shaky, partly because of the release from the stress and partly because it is quite a momentous occasion to be finally holding something I’ve been working on for the past two years, and that’s just for the book itself: the writing of the stories themselves goes back way more than that.

The book will be available for purchase on Friday 26^th. That’s less than a week from now! Amazing!