One of my biggest pet peeves is semantic pedantry, especially if it hinges on invalidating colloquial usage of a term.
It’s one thing to correct somebody who mistakingly uses a similar-sounding but different-meaning word than what they intended. A good example of this is correcting someone who says “equivocal” when that person actually meant “equivalent.”
However, it’s another thing entirely to fail to understand that words are shaped by how society uses them, not merely a dictionary or an educational textbook. An example of this would be someone saying that it’s invalid for humans to identify as asexual as a sexual orientation because in biology, the term “asexual” describes organisms that can reproduce without sexual activity.
Being unable to differentiate between connotation and denotation isn’t the level of intellect people think it is. It’s actually the contrary, as it shows a lack of nuance and an effort to grasp at straws only done by small-minded people who think that solely adhering to literal definitions and rejecting common usage is somehow indicative of some heightened degree of intelligence.
I felt inspired to say this because someone on a YouTube video wrote a comment pertaining to Indigenous people, and a “scholar” responded, “What you’re saying makes no sense because everyone is Indigenous to somewhere on the planet.”
It’s the degree of smugness that is so damn disproportionate with how warranted the smugness actually is that gets me.
Also, this isn’t referring to instances where discussing the meaning of a word actually serves some purpose and isn’t just nitpicking. That’s a whole other subject.
Basically, fuck these people! 
Woah looks like anti-semanticism is on the rise just like they said on the news!
It’s literally the Ur- antisocial behavior. Communication is a cooperative effort. Pedants are openly obstructing basic communication for no reason. Having a conversation at all presupposes that you’ll try to meet me partway, that we both want to understand each other.
It’s like some people never thought about why humans talk to each other.
I think you mean Pedantic Semantics.
I deploy it in exactly one scenario: when the other person is being a condescending prick. Then it is time for a tactical pedantry launch because I can 100% play that game and win lol.
I want you to know that people who do this shit aren’t being serious about semantics and word definitions and there is no convincing to be had. Someone who says those things 100% don’t care about words at all and are 100% instead entirely acting in bad faith to use your good-faith discussion to devalue you and the seriousness the things you say, and by doing so insinuate further into the body of discussion the scum fascist implications underlying their undermining games. It’s not about the ‘literal definitions vs connotative and colloquial definitions’ and intellect to them. It is about exactly the effects of their flippant bad-faith rhetorical games in exhausting and frustrating and toying with you to further the space they can take up from you and in the discourse and spread the visible reach of their rhetoric which conceals underneath the wretched perspectives which they deliberately avoid saying concretely.
It is exactly the strategy and outlook described in Sartre’s The Antisemite and the JewThe anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: “I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc.” Never believe that anti‐ Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.
It is one of the reasons why one does not ‘debate’ fascists. They are not serious or good-faith interlocutors on a fundamental base level, and actively exploit and abuse for their own ends that assumption of them.
I’m on the spectrum, so I get liking lists of things and rigid categories and hierarchies of knowlege, but it drives me wild that there are these people, who speak and write a language, who are like, prideful even of having a narrow range of literacy, where definitions are affixed, spelling is as steady as nuclear decay, and convention, punctuation, and the wonders of the modern world simultaneously conspire to strip out most ambiguity in language, it doesn’t feel like an accomplishment to have a narrow view of what language is? It doesn’t feel like a good thing that anything more than simple metaphor, uncritical and literal examination of text, and obsession with form over intelligibility is beyond you because you’re really fucked up and gigglin because somebody threw down the wrong They back there, or used a word in an unsancitoned way.
Like literally- lol- you have entire cohorts of people whose identity has some load bearing amount of “I’m better than you because I can invalidate your language on a range of meaningless technicalities.” in people for whom a metaphor of any complexity would be flayed open and fed through the sleucing machine of their mind if it ever fell upon their ears
Like okay, train someone in archaic languages using a basic grammar book, and then have them try to read some medieval latin manuscript and see how smart they feel after 15 minutes
What you’re saying makes no sense because everyone is Indigenous to somewhere on the planet
Genocide on this cracker
Other than that also agreed
“Look, my foot’s about to be Indigenous to your ass, pal”
The whole “poisonous vs. venomous” thing always makes me say “It’s not going to matter when a cobra bites you in the fucking face.”
If the speaker and listener both understand the meaning and intent of the word being used, it doesn’t really matter what word is used. It happens pretty regularly in normal conversation where a person will stutter or slur their words, but the people listening know what they’re talking about. Half the time you can communicate precisely with “That thing with the guy at the place where there was that other thing.” If the people in that conversation know what’s being referenced, there’s nothing to be gained by arguing over proper nouns or whatever the fuck.
It will matter if I bite that cobra first though.
How are you gonna bite it first when it teleports behind you? While you were shitposting, the cobra was studying the nom.
I do not like this bird, Charlie. Its smug aura offends me.
My favorite irl pedantry is correcting -phobes that using “them” in the singular is actually grammatically correct. Since it’s usually an argument with
pedants and civility libs it usually gets them all riled up. Disregarding that I don’t really care about grammar, it’s fun to do a little bad faith and remind them their ignorance is bottomless.What makes me legitimately mad about -phobes trying that is that the singular “they” is natural language. Every fucking -phobe uses it because it just flows absolutely naturally in the English language and fucking everybody uses it without ever thinking about it
But the moment they’re asked to do it for an enby, they act as if we’ve asked them to choose one of their own limbs to sacrifice
linguistic prescriptivism is a fuck
I don’t correct people for writing phase when they mean faze, but I do look at it with sad grandparent eyes
Really? It doesn’t phase me at all when people do that
What about Semantic poetry?
I think it gets overused, especially where the meaning is otherwise still very clear or it was just obviously a typo or quick mistake. I think there’s room for semantic pedantry when someone is genuinely being ambiguous, though.
I do it though, and at least in my personal life, it really helps me to clear up meanings where I genuinely don’t understand what people mean. It’s hard to ride the line of “Do you mean x?” or “I assume you mean x” without coming across as condescending, but I really do plead that it has a place. And I can only apologise for times when i am
, I don’t always do it perfectly, but what will seem to others as me having an annoying focus on minor detail, or being overly prescriptivist, is actually a habit that serves me well and helps me communicate better, so I don’t intend to stop.Being a pedant for the sole purpose of just arguing over nothing, like the indigenous example you provide though, I agree is silly.
