in reply to Re: Another day, another nit
in thread Another day, another nit

Accuracy and consistency are keys to good spelling. Pedantry is defined explicitly with negative connotations: being excessive in demonstrating one's superior learning or skill, or being ostentatious about pointing out other people's inaccuracy.

(Admittedly, an example may very well be this, my post.)

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Re^3: Another day, another nit
by jonix (Friar) on Dec 22, 2005 at 17:16 UTC
    You are right, thanks for pointing that out. Pedantry is just another word for nit-picking. I am not a native english speaker so I might have streched the words meaning to far.
    The point I wanted to make is that it depends on your audience and subject wether your current level of accuracy and consistency is considered appropriate. While it is perfectly possible to be a pedant without applying much accuracy and consistency (I would call this pathologic pedantry), you might have to become a bit of a pedant to yourself temporarily i.e. if you want to learn orthography or Perl, just until your new and now essential level of accuracy and consistency has become a habit.
    In this positive sense pedantry lost its negative connotations sometimes, at least for me. Most other humans will most likely consider perlmonks to be pedants anyway ;)
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