The Good and the Bad Pedant

There are two sorts of pedants: those who are aware that they are are pedants, and those that aren’t. The former - the conscious pedant - is a harmless beast. He’s taken on board the essential triviality of his concerns: the world at large is either unaware of the whole issue of ‘correct usage ’ which so exercises him, or knows that there are more important things to worry about. (Or, as emended by the pedant, ‘about which to worry’.) Knowing himself, the conscious pedant uses his foible as a source of mirth. The unconscious pedant, however, is a humourless individual, who uses his knowledge to bolster his feeling of superiority and sense of self-importance, oblivious of the fact that in so doing he only succeeds in making himself look a pretentious tosser.

Today’s Observer contained examples of both sorts of pedantry: a witty article by Euan Ferguson (Man your apostrophes, my friends, and support the pedants' revolt) and a reader’s pompous letter reproduced below:

The big issue: The Kercher murder. The persecution of Amanda Knox goes on

While I share Barbara Ellen's concerns that the murder victim Meredith Kercher seems to have been forgotten by the press reporting of the trial in Perugia ("Meredith, not Knox, deserves our thoughts", Opinion, last week), it is a pity she accuses Amanda Knox of "flowery oratory" in her final statement to the court using a sloppy translation.

"Ho paura di avere una maschera di assassina forzata sulla mia pelle" means she doesn't want to be branded a murderer, not to be "given the mask of the assassin". Having watched the whole speech in which she not only thanked her friends and family for their support but even acknowledged the job her accusers had to do, it certainly did not "sound like some ham mangling Shakespeare".

My impression was of watching an innocent young woman, who'd already spent two long years in a foreign jail, feeling vulnerable but hoping she would receive a fair verdict – and judging from the more balanced reporting elsewhere in your paper, we may yet see the guilty verdict overturned on appeal.

Sue Newte

London SE7

The opening sentence’s subordinate adverbial clause of concession, as we pedants put it, makes one’s hackles rise. Just as one knows ‘While I’m not anti-semitic/homophobic/racist, some of my best friends are Jews/gay/black, but …’ is always the prelude to some disgusting piece of prejudice, what follows the Newte’s opening remark demonstrates that she does not share Barbara Ellen’s concerns at all. Her ‘impression’ that Amanda Knox is innocent outweighs the verdict of the court.

But the real reason for the letter is her desire to demonstrate that her command of Italian is better than Barbara Ellen’s. It is not. ‘Given the mask of the assassin’, one slight quibble aside, is a literal not a ‘sloppy’ translation. Whilst it’s usual to translate assassina as ‘murderess’, a pedant should know that the English word ‘assassin’ simply means ‘murderer’. It’s only contemporary usage - and when has that carried any weight with the stickler for ‘correctness’ - which has conflated its meaning with ‘hired assassin’ - i.e. someone who carries out a killing on behalf of a political or religious idea, or another individual or organisation. As Barbara Ellen says, the translation has preserved the floweriness of the original. A straightforward wish not to be branded might be expressed as: ‘Ho paura d’essere bollata’ or ‘d’essere stigmatizzata’. The same wish expressed figuratively might be ‘Non mi piace aver la parte d’assassina imporre a me’. Only a ‘ham mangling Shakespeare’ would complain of having a murderess’s mask forced upon herself. The Newte is confusing translating the idiom of one language into its equivalent in another (e.g. ‘poppet’ not ‘cauliflower’ when choufleur is used as an endearment) with preserving the original’s register. To translate Knox’s statement as ‘branded as a murderer’ is as inadequate as flatly translating la Serenissima as ‘Venice’, The Smoke as ‘Londra’, or some twerpette writing to the Observer as ‘la signora Newte’.

That’s better: now I’m feeling superior and a lot more self-important - or would be if anyone read this blog!

Darwin and sanctity

I was expelled from the first school I attended. The nuns told my mother that ‘James is a very naughty boy. We’d like you to remove him.’

‘Why don’t you smack him?’

Unusually for the nineteen-forties, and remarkably so in the light of recent revelations about some orders’ behaviour in Ireland, they replied primly: ‘We don’t believe in corporal punishment.’

Being expelled from kindergarten may explain why at my next school, when each child in the class was asked what he or she wanted to be when grown up I replied, ‘A saint.’ An answer greeted by general hilarity. But if one forgets canonisation and thinks instead of managing to grab a priest for the last-rites, followed by an extended stay in purgatory, not an entirely implausible ambition.

I was reminded of my Somerset infant school by an article about Darwin’s legacy I read a couple of days ago. Click here to read it. Although I knew about the Nazis' obsession with the pseudo-science of eugenics, and was vaguely aware that it had had a following in the western democracies, I hadn’t realised how widespread that following was, or how horrific its consequences. The activities of the British Eugenics Society led to ‘to the imprisonment without trial of more than 40,000 people. Many were detained for "moral imbecility" - having children out of wedlock, committing petty crimes, or displaying homosexual inclinations. Some would remain incarcerated for 20 years.’

The real shock, though, came from reading:

‘Darwin's ideas have also fathered some of the most grotesque instances of man's inhumanity to man.
Darwin's decision to represent as a scientific fact that the several races of mankind had travelled different distances down the evolutionary path - that white Europeans were, in short, more highly evolved than Africans or Australian Aborigines - has had appalling consequences. Today, Darwin's supporters frequently make light of his racial views, claiming that he was no more racist than the average upper-middle-class gentlemen of his day, and warning that we should not try to impose the politically correct attitudes of our own times on to the past. But Darwin's racism was very different from that of his contemporaries.

Though any Victorian Englishman might have regarded himself as socially superior to the lawless, savage tribes he encountered throughout the Empire, only Darwin - as the man who discovered evolution by natural selection - could provide an underpinning for racial superiority in biology and evolutionary science. Only Darwin could establish the notion of a hierarchy of races as a scientific orthodoxy that would prevail through much of the following century.

… Darwin's second catastrophic error was to promote the view that the poorest sections of society were genetically inferior to the educated middle class and that most, if not all, the traits that led to pauperism were hereditary. Darwin's analysis generated a fear that if the working class continued to breed faster than the middle class, then the society would continue down a spiral of genetic degeneration.’

Although I knew about Social Darwinism I’d always believed that it was a completely unwarranted distortion of the great man’s teachings rather than an integral part of them. I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised that the seamy side of Darwin’s theories should have been brushed under the carpet. We all like our saints made of plaster rather than flesh and blood. Think of the Whisky Priest, Graham Greene’s anonymous protagonist in The Power and the Glory. As well as being dependent on alcohol, the priest has an illegitimate daughter. The apostate priest, José, at his wife’s instigation, refuses to administer the last rites to the whisky priest before his execution. So he dies believing he is damned, though the theologically literate reader will know that his final emotion- ‘He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all’ - is an act of pure contrition which will save him. And the common reader, of any belief or none, will know him to be a good man who, despite his many frailties, did his best to do what he believed to be right. But as soon as he is dead the pious turn him into a plaster saint:

'And that one,' the boy said, 'they shot today. Was he a hero too?'

'Yes.'

'The one who stayed with us that time?'

'Yes. He was one of the martyrs of the Church.'

'He had a funny smell,' one of the little girls said.

'You must never say that again,' the mother said. 'He may be one of the saints.'

'Shall we pray to him then?'

The mother hesitated. 'It would do no harm. Of course, before we know he is a saint, there will have to be miracles ... '

'Did he call "Viva el Cristo Rey"?' the boy asked .. '.

'Yes. He was one of the heroes of the faith.'

'And a handkerchief soaked in blood?' the boy went on, 'Did anyone do that?'

The mother said ponderously, 'I have reason to believe … Señora Jiminez told me … I think if your father will give me a little money, I shall be able to get a relic.'

'Does it cost money?'

'How else could it be managed? Everybody can't have a piece.’

One would have thought that it would be more inspiring to know that greatness or sanctity can be found in someone whose ideas or behaviour are in many respects deplorable. Darwin was wrong to propagate the belief that some groups of people are inherently inferior to others; the Whisky Priest was wrong to break his vow of celibacy. But they are both heroic figures, because of, rather than despite, their frailties.