Are pedants often just people who aren't as clever as they think they are?

[Fragmentedbrain]

Left with nowhere to go conversationally besides picking up on typos or in jokes

?

I think you might be in the wrong corner my dear.
I like being a pedant. I think I'm fairly self aware that my knowledge is limited to apostrophes, obscure philosophers and 90s indie music.
The definition of pedant lends itself to being a bit of a jobsworth/stickler and I think that is ok. There are ways of not being an insufferable know it all though.

Shouldn’t “in jokes” be hyphenated?

🤣

Probably

😂😂😂

I have no problem with being the last bastion of the semi-colon.

I love a semi-colon. I use them all the time; probably too much.

It’s literally my job to be a pedant so I will not stop it, or I won’t get paid.

I’m very clever as well. Not because I know how to use commas though.

I'm inclined to agree @Fragmentedbrain.
Sometimes I just want to biff someone when they are being pedantic. I don't mind sarcasm at all, though.

Occasionally, they may be 😂

Often, though, my observation is that they are just people surrounded by idiots who have no more fucks to give and who have stopped caring about tiptoing around other people's inferiority complexes. 🤔

Are you also a copy editor/word nerd/professional pedant? I love seeing mistakes in the wild because it reassures me my services are still needed. Either that, or standards will drop so much that no one will care anymore and we'll go extinct.

Yeh copyeditor is my main day job tho I have a number of other educational-type roles tbf.

Favourite error this week – “when we are on-route” my DH was shocked but I have seen that before.

Clever people at work trot out “on masse” and use ”myself” with abandon.

I don’t know what to think. I do know I feel a little let down.

Exactly. I'm not more intelligent than others; I just happen to be good at word stuff. It's my job. I'm just a mild-mannered copy editor who enjoys spotting and fixing errors. Most people are good at one or two things and average or bad at others. I also have a few obscure special interests. I like 90s indie too, and 60s psychedelic rock.

I'm glad people make mistakes in writing. If they didn't, I'd be out of a job.

This. Though no one is, in my view, ‘very clever’ if they misuse semi-colons, no matter what else they can do.

According to Lynne Truss, it's the apostrophe we should be worried about -- it may be going the way of the dodo.

Are pedants often just people who aren't as clever as they think they are?

You may be thinking of peasants.

Also, pedantry can be a lot of fun:

www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

I haven't seen that one before either, although I'm not surprised.

I've been looking for a new flat and have seen a few houses described as being in 'sort-after' areas.

I'm sure more estate agents will start using AI to write their property descriptions soon, which will mean fewer errors. I'm not sure if this is good or bad.

I like when someone uses a word they think will make them sound intelligent but it's the wrong word

'People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do'

I'm with Isaac Asimov on this one.😂

Do we hyphenate compound nouns in British English? I haven’t got my New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors to hand to check “in jokes”.

I’m a pedant by MN standards. Which means, broadly, that glaring errors and vogue words and phrases irritate me. ‘Could of’ for ‘could have’, for example, as an error. And for vogue words, if the stupid term ‘gaslighting’ died out I’d be very pleased.

What I do dislike, though, is language purity for its own sake. There’s nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition or splitting an infinitive, unless either is very ugly - but that’s a matter of style rather than correctness.

I find they easily get lost in the ethos, though.

Good post. My obscure knowledge is even more obscure than that. It's a good thing that MN has this little corner where we can all huddle together and howl at the moon over the decline of the apostrophe, the inability to spell common words and other heinous offences. It keeps us off the streets, so has to be a good thing, surely?