Pedantries

I was listening recently to a beloved Ken Jennings podcast, and I --along with the rest of the listening universe -- could not help but notice that his co-host (the also beloved John Roderick) kept pronouncing the name of the familiar brand of canned pasta-and-tomato-sauce-based-food-stuffs -- bizarrely -- as "Scabettios." I had to rewind and play it back twice to be sure I'd heard correctly. There was no mistaking it. Scabettios.

I wasn't sure if this was an inside joke or a slip of the tongue. I was certain that Ken would eventually explain it to us, if John offered no rationale. I waited. John said it again. Ken did nothing. One could almost hear him contemplating an intervention and deciding against it. John said it again. Scabettios. Still, Ken said nothing. John must have done it five or six times before finally Ken weighed in. "Why are you calling it Scabettios?" he asked.

This long silence was not the result of a malicious or puckish delight on Ken's part in leaving John dangling far out on a limb of his highly eccentric pronunciation. There is not a drop of malice or spite in Ken's unblemished soul. Rather, his hesitation stemmed from something far nobler. It was an act of tolerant forbearance. Ken was choosing to apply Pope's principle of criticism that to err is human, and to forgive divine. He was not going to correct another person, even when they persisted in something that seemed willfully perverse.

In a more recent episode of the podcast still, Ken explained that he is aware of this trait within himself. As someone who was once a know-it-all kid, he says, he learned early on that people hate being corrected. Out of an admirable desire not to cause other people pain, therefore, a respect for their feelings, if you will, he decided that he would never do it again. "So if somebody tells a story I know has been debunked," he mentions, by way of example, "I just let it go."

Now, there is a friend of mine, mentioned earlier, who does not forbear. He seems to have personally soaked up whatever malice and puckishness was drained out of Ken in the Mormon pre-birth celestial state. Whenever I allow the slightest opening to appear in my intellectual armoring, he sends in a dart. Whenever I betray the slightest weakness, he is ready with the finishing blow.

"Lawrence Ferlinghetti," I once said, giving it a soft "g" as in "giant." To me, even as I look at it now, this is still how the name ought to be pronounced. So what if it's plainly Italian? So what if I might therefore have reasoned by analogy from "spaghetti," all the way to the hard "g"? If John Roderick has taught us anything, it's that pasta-related words are hard to keep straight.

Suffice it to say my friend sprang in with a "ghetti," pronounced like the name of the museum, and was plainly immensely pleased with himself. I had to look it up fifteen times, in fifteen different sources, before I could satisfy myself that he was actually right. And this is not even to speak of our tangle over the pronunciation of the name of the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn.

I never behave as my friend behaves in these moments. Having felt the sting of such pedantries myself, I refuse to respond in kind. To this day, I apply the Ken Jennings principle to a fault.

Recently at the office, I was speaking to a coworker, and I noticed that her sweatshirt was on inside-out.  Many people in this situation would have said something. In fact, the vast majority of people I've met would have been unable to resist. They would not have thought twice about it. "Your sweatshirt's on inside-out" they would have said.

And I can hear them vindicating themselves in their own minds as they do it. "It would have been more embarrassing overall if she had talked to other people while it was still inside-out," they say to themselves, preening.

I take it as a sign of a nobler, gentler, Ken Jennings-like nature on my part that I reject such crude consequentialist reasoning. I take a virtue ethics approach to the question of whether one should or should not tell someone their sweatshirt is inside-out.

I know that I have been in the position -- more times than I can count -- of being the one with his sweatshirt on inside-out in life. I know how it feels to have this sort of thing pointed out to you. I know that one is never grateful to the person who points it out, and one never accepts their brutal utilitarian calculus that it is all for one's greater good. Therefore, I prefer not to be the sort of person who does this to people.

And so, in this situation, I remained silent. The next time I saw her, the sweatshirt was on the right way again. And this is the thing the pedants will not admit -- the person nearly always realizes their mistake on their own, without having to experience the social humiliation that the pedant demands as a sacrifice to the cheap thrill they obtain of an ill-deserved and fleeting superiority.

I was telling my malicious friend all of this, and I quoted to him a line of Hazlitt that I'd been saving up for this sort of occasion. It was all about how the pedants of the world are always small-souled individuals who -- possessing so little genius in themselves -- must pursue the false sensation of it by harping on the minor errors of the people around them.

I made him wait on the line while I went to look the passage up and read it aloud:

"The coxcomb criticises the dress of the clown," says Hazlitt, "as the pedant cavils at the bad grammar of the illiterate, or the prude is shocked at the backslidings of her frail acquaintance. Those who have the fewest resources in themselves naturally seek the food of their self-love elsewhere. [...] True worth does not exult in the faults and deficiencies of others; as true refinement turns away from grossness and deformity, instead of being tempted to indulge in an unmanly triumph over it. [...] Real power, real excellence, does not seek for a foil in inferiority; nor fear contamination from coming in contact with that which is coarse and homely. It reposes on itself, and is equally free from spleen and affectation."

I felt a great burst of satisfied egotism knowing that Hazlitt was on my (and Ken Jennings') side in this matter. So I made sure to rub my friend's nose in it. As the great Tom Magliozzi of Car Talk fame would put it: "The great thing about me is my humility."

The only downside of the Hazlitt quote is that -- even as it depicts my friend as the caviling pedant -- it might by the same token be understood to cast me in the role of the illiterate, the clown, the frail friend, etc.

I therefore need to turn back to Alexander Pope, whom we mentioned earlier. Much of the purpose of his "Essay on Criticism" is to urge -- captiously and cantankerously -- the critic toward beneficent restraint and generosity of spirit when faced with the apparent errors of others. "Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do," he reminds us, "Men must be taught as if you taught them not,/ And things unknown proposed as things forgot."

It so happens this is an insight known to every practitioner and exponent of adult education the world over. All will state this as a fact of nature: children can be taught new information directly. They are eager to learn. Adults, by contrast-- in order to learn something new -- must somehow be tricked into thinking that they knew it all along; indeed, that they'd thought of it themselves. Correcting people therefore achieves nothing.

One would like to adopt the airy position of a Ken Jennings or an Alexander Pope or a Hazlitt, and simply announce that one is so confident in one's own intellectual resources that one finds it beneath one's dignity to pounce upon the deficiencies of others, and lord it over them.

But how does one combat the possibility that one might dislike being corrected not because one is so far superior to the one doing the correcting, but rather because one is so far inferior? One is back to the problem of being the potential clown or frail friend again.

Here is where Pope gives us another out. There is always the possibility that one intended to make the error, for one's own mysterious reasons, and that the purposes served by doing so were simply too distant and lofty to be within the ken (no pun intended) of one's persecutors. Writes Pope:

 I know there are, to whose presumptuous thoughts
Those freer beauties, ev'n in them, seem faults.
Some figures monstrous and misshap'd appear,
Consider'd singly, or beheld too near,
Which, but proportion'd to their light, or place,
Due distance reconciles to form and grace.
A prudent chief not always must display
His pow'rs in equal ranks, and fair array,
But with th' occasion and the place comply,
Conceal his force, nay seem sometimes to fly.
Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,
Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.

But this raises, in turn, an even more disturbing possibility. Perhaps John Roderick was making some inscrutable and mysterious joke - some abstruse reference - in the form of his mispronunciation, and it simply sailed not only over my own but over Ken Jennings' head as well.

Perhaps there is a reason the cognitive elite speak of "Scabettios," rather than use its more familiar name. And it is simply lost on me.