A Self-Hating Pedant

...or should that be "A Pedant Who Hates Himself" or "A Pedant Which Hates Himself Because He Is A Pedant" or "A Pedant That Hates Himself, Due To His Pedantry."

Yes.

I am a pedant. I am not especially articulate, and I am not especially critical of others in most circumstances. However I have a verbal tic.

Every time someone is grammatically incorrect in speech, or mis-pronounces a word, I will respond with a correction.

Sometimes I manage to bite my tongue and get away with just thinking the criticism very loudly.

I am aware this is annoying and boorish and I can also bring to mind several occasions when it has got me into little social faux pas.

It is an artifact of my upbringing (and probably one that will, on balance, do more good than harm for me over the course of my life). One of my particular annoyances is when I want to use a word and suddenly realise that although I know perfectly well what it means and how it is spelt I don't know how to pronounce it.

Hegemony.

What? Exactly! Is the "g" like the "j" in "just" or is it like the "g" in "grandma?"

Thank goodness for Wikipedia and the phonetic alphabet.

Anyway Marcel Berlins has written a stock journalistic article: "let's do something really straightforward and easy to make the world a better place."



A long time ago USAmericans, Canadians, and Australians (and New Zealanders, possibly) rationalised their versions of English by pronouncing clerk as "clerk" rather than clerk as in "Clarke" (as in Arthur C...). They also changed the spelling of "colour" to "color" and did a whole load of other sensible things.

But in the UK these words remain irrationally pronounced and spelt.

The reason for this is that there is a very strong vein of illogical, bloody-minded, stupidity in the British (the English, in particular)...

[ouch! my future self just dropped a few points in the speculative polls or whatever the hell the media uses to cripple the democratic process 20 years hence ... don't worry Future Self, you'd never make it as a Tory (you went to comprehensive school for gawd's sake). Go and try to get elected in Scotland. Bashing the English would probably win you some votes there. Go squander what remains of the oil money...]

...that results in things like this (crappy video link, SSM).

It also results in the sort of people whose sense of morality is based around the sort of trash Melanie Phillips writes in the Daily Hate Mail (she's only doing it because she gets paid more as a "right wing" blowhard than a "left wing" blowhard --- and more power to her for it!) getting shirty because something profoundly "British" like inches, pounds, ounces, and pronouncing ghoti "fish" (Google it or read Berlins) is being "attacked" by meddling bureaucrats from Brussels.



None of that was actually very clear, was it?

Essentially a key component of Britishness is doing something stupidly perverse just because you've always done it like that.

Beyond the point of being funny or endearing.

Seriously.



Also: the first two comments on that Marcel Berlins article have a rather lovely bit of pedantry...

Britishness

Like most young people I'm used to being told that "things aren't as good as they used to be" or that the world's been going to Hell in a hajib since 1968.

Usually I dismiss this as fairly run-of-the-mill middle-aged-ness but occasionally I come across a genuinely thoughtful observation of how Britain has changed. This article at The Times by Minette Marrin doesn't actually contain any but it does discuss the effect of the belief that things ain't what they used to be has on people, specifically middle class (ugh) people.

I seem to have lost my thread....

OK: here it is again.

Britishness.

The state or the government, civil service, and public bodies in general are there to do their damn job and provide services effectively using tax appropriated from workers, companies, and tariffs.

The state is certainly not there to define moral values. The legislature obviously has to bear in mind commonly held moral beliefs and ethics but it has no place in defining them.

Judicial bodies have some say in the nature of morality and what constitutes legal behaviour but judges again have to bow to commonly held beliefs about what is right and wrong when they make their decisions.

The people who define what is right and wrong are the people. Individuals have to make choices in how they behave, and as it doesn't make any sense to discuss individuals without discussing society (the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was quoted out of context on that one) then larger groups, tribes, and communities have to be brought in to chew the fat and make relative judgments on morality.

The state, in the form of the executive government, bureaucracy, legislature and judiciary have a small role to play in this process but in a democratic state should bow to the will of the majority.

So any discussion of "Britishness" is useless (i.e. this blog is useless, but I mean any serious discussion of Britishness --- actually now I come to think of it taking the piss out of the debate is probably the only thing everyone has in common when it comes to discussing Britishness, so in a way I suppose taking the piss is British...).

Forcing an ethical structure on groups of people from outside or from the higher power of the state or church is counterproductive and generates resentment and conflict.

"Shared values" are exactly that. If everyone in Britain suddenly took a liking for wanking-cherub-style water-features then we would say that Britishness was about liking wanking-cherub-style water-features.

In other words, "Britishness" and the "shared values" of the British people are defined by the British people as they are now, not by Gordon Brown or Minette Marrin or Paul Dacre or any other politician or commentator.

Of course these people are fully entitled to express their opinion as to what Britishness ought to be, and I'm fully entitled to complain about their pomposity and presumption.

'Cos it's freedom of speech, innit?