Craig Brown in the Telegraph on what horrors might emerge from a conference of pedants :
… A cry of horror erupted in the hall. “I must ask the gentleman in the beige cardigan to leave the hall,” said the Chairman. “We cannot sanction a split infinitive.”
“I refute your suggestion that this is a cardigan,” retorted the offending gentleman. “A cardigan buttons, or, if you will, unbuttons, to the waist. This garment buttons only a quarter of the way down, to just above the chest. So it is not a cardigan in the strict sense of the word, but a jersey, even though that aforementioned island is not, strictly speaking, its country of origin.”
There followed a heated discussion over the speaker’s use of the word refute: some thought he meant deny, while others believed he would have been better off employing – or at least using – confute.
“On a point of information, Chairman.” The speaker was a woman with a bun in her hair, by which I mean not a woman with a small, sweetened bread roll or cake (often with dried fruit) in her hair, but a woman whose hair was drawn into a tight coil at the back of her head. “On a point of information, I must point out that, in the original novel, Frankenstein was not, as is commonly supposed, the monster, but rather the inventor of that monster.”
A murmur of approval swept – metaphorically – around the room. We pedants always appreciate being reminded of the F-point, even if it hasn’t been raised. “May I also add,” continued the woman with the bun, “that, contrary to popular misconception, King Canute was only too well aware that he could not hold back the tide.”
“Your statement did not require that superfluous ‘also’,” interjected the Chairman, “for it means ‘in addition’: if you say ‘May I also add’ you are, in effect, saying ‘May I add add’. I’m not sure that this was what you meant to infer.”
“Imply! Imply! Imply!” The entire hall – or, at least, all those contained within it – chanted at the Chairman. He left in tears, knowing as well as anyone that the incorrect use of the word “infer” has always been a resigning matter.
PedantCon sounds like something SF fandom would turn out in force for, if they could ever agree on whether it were a con, a symposium or an AGM.
