Lootman wrote:Yes and moreover I have found that pedantry is a particularly British (or perhaps, English?) thing. For instance in my time working in the US I don't think I ever had anyone try and pull me up with: "Actually old bean, the pluperfect tense of that verb is . . .". Nor in the other places I worked like Canada, Switzerland and Hong Kong. As long as you know what the other guy means, that is sufficient. And that was before the age of smart phones and text speak.
I wonder sometimes whether pedantry (to use its polite term, one could call it being nitpicky or even anal-retentive) is really a deflection or cover-up? Like when someone replies to a post here to draw attention to a typo or syntactic error in order to avoid answering the point?
Pish tosh, and indeed piffle. Romanes eunt domus.
Most of us[1] apply different standards according to the company we're in. Pedantry is reserved for cases where the other party really should know better, which is very rarely the case in an international context. Or with foreigners, where there's an element of language tuition in the relationship.
[1] Perhaps not all, as witness John's account of his Pakistani friend. Though if the friend's English was sufficiently good, he may have treated the speaker as native.