主题：【原创】打老虎与拔萝卜 -- 孙勇进

It reminds of an article I read in Guardian.

Proud to be pedantic

David McKie

Thursday October 14, 2004

The Guardian

Whatever her other accomplishments, Janet Leigh, the Hollywood star who died at the start of this month, was remembered for a single screen moment: the moment when Anthony Perkins closed in on her as she took a shower in a motel in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Few who sat transfixed through that scene have ever forgotten it, and Janet Leigh certainly didn't: it was even suggested that she never again took a shower thereafter.

Yet among her vast, worldwide audience, one member at least, it appears, was unenthralled, even wholly unfrightened. In a letter to Saturday's Daily Telegraph, Dr Ross Watkin of Chipstead wrote: "Someone should have told Hitchcock that a dead person's pupils are widely dilated. The final shot of the murdered Janet Leigh on the shower floor showed normal-size pupils. It quite ruined the film for me ..."

One of the most awe-inspiring moments in the history of the cinema, one of a great director's most gripping effects, "ruined" by a minor physiological error? There must have been many reading this letter who thought to themselves: gosh, what a pedant! A pedant, that is, in the modern, derogatory sense of the word, not its earliest sense, which carried no hint of derision.

Pedant, the OED tells us, originally meant, simply, a teacher - a word no more necessarily insulting than pedagogue. "He loves to have a fencer, a pedant and a musician seen in his lodgings," Ben Jonson wrote in 1599, with no indication that the pedant was any less to be honoured than his companions.

Advertiser links

Driving Experiences

Driving Experiences direct from the operator. Buy online and...

everymanracing.co.uk

Wide Range of Driving Experiences

One gift voucher covers dozens of driving experiences at the...

passport2sport.co.uk

Driving Experiences - Buyagift.co.uk

Driving experiences from Ferraris to tanks throughout the...

buyagift.co.uk

The character known as Pedant in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew is hardly what we'd now call pedantic. Holofernes, in Love's Labour's Lost, with his Latin tags and his promise to "overglance the superscript" and his sudden wounded cry, when some duffer confuses "unguem" with "dunghill": "O, I smell false Latin!" might be classed today as a pedant of the most preening and tedious kind, but Shakespeare spares him that label.

But already by the late 16th century, the word pedant was coming to mean a person who overrates book learning or technical knowledge or who displays it unreasonably; one whose learning is untempered by practical knowledge; one who lays excessive stress on trifling detail (Dr Watkin's presumed offence in the case of Janet Leigh) or strict adherence to formal rules.

At about the same time, Montaigne, in an essay on pedants, noted that Italian farces he'd seen in his youth had always, to his delight, equated pedants with fools; and indeed, that this was nothing new, since according to Plutarch the Romans used Greek and scholar as terms of reproach. Nor did he think this unjust. Like birds which went out foraging, picking up grain that they did not taste themselves but fed to their young, undigested, pedants, Montaigne complained, grubbed up knowledge here and there out of books to spit out and publish abroad.

Yet I think it is wrong that pedants are lumped together in the uncritical way that they are. A Holofernes behaves as he does out of vanity and conceit. That charge cannot be laid against Dr Watkin of Chipstead. What he remembers from Psycho is not any glow of satisfaction which came from noting that his knowledge of pupil dilation in the recently dead was better than Alfred Hitchcock's. What he says is that Hitchcock's error "quite ruined the film for me".

Life is like that for pedants. A hanging participle, a use of "criteria" with a singular verb, saying "reign" when the writer means "rein"- all these, as the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column demonstrates daily, induce pangs ofgenuine pain.

If I say, as I do because of a sense of history, that Tynemouth on the north-east coast is part of Northumbria, the pedant who writes to complain to the Guardian that I should have put the place in North Tyneside, this being the name of the present local authority, does so (I hope) less from a wish to show off than because he feels wounded.

The astonishing success of Lynne Truss's book about English usage, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, shows that thousands feel the same way. Let's have a fair deal for pedants. When they - well, all right then, when we - flinch at greengrocers' apostrophes, false Latin, or cinematographers' ignorance about the basic facts of pupil dilation, do not mock us, but feel our pain.