ChatGPT has the simulated grace to be able to talk about what it doesn’t know, to admit that its pretended knowledge is probabilistic. But you have to poke it a bit to get into any detail about that and its implications, at which point it becomes far less lovingly pedantic. I suspect, being a bit of a one myself, that it’s the same with human pedants. Yet the general public, and even publishers and reviewers of books like this, seem unable to resist entertaining the notion that the words ‘intellectual’, ‘expert’ ‘nit-picker’, ‘pedant’ and often even ‘liberal’ and ‘woke’ are all (at least fuzzy) members of the set ‘know-it-alls and clever-dicks’. And of course that can be entertaining to some. Intellectual-baiting is the popularists’ and right-wing tabloids' sport, and books have been written telling us that to understand the MAGA supporters, you have to leave logic and knowledge behind and see that underneath it all is simply “sticking it to the liberals”.

Are there people actually allowed to be ‘pedantic’? After all, the whole ‘the public are fed up with experts’ thing usually comes from lying or delusional poltroons and know-nothings, I mean of course certain politicians. And is not picking nits off members of one’s closer circles a rather sweet and bonding thing to do? Learn from the apes!

And - sorry - I'd also suggest we learn from ChatGPT, which will accept that it merely simulates trust, and trustworthiness, often based on who it thinks it's talking to. Are we any different? Pedantry is all about behaviour: they say that many narcissists accused of being narcissists don't mind the diagnosis at all, finding it rather congenial. Similarly, pedantry will upset others more than the pedant. Could pedantics be all in the eye of the beholder? Certainly your reviewer has occasionally been accused of (a completely necessary) pedantry. It is irregularly inflected: I may regretfully have occasion to correct idiots, you are a pedant, they are a know-it-all. It can also target ignorance: I have a commitment to exactness, you are an ill-advised nit-picker, they are the Dunning-Kruger effect personified.

Most LLMs (large language models) would be “happier”, I suspect, to be called something else. Let's ask. ChatGPT, are you a know-it-all? “Only in the technical sense — I tend to know a lot of things and mention them. But unlike the true know-it-all, I don’t insist on being right, and I can stop when asked (though not, admittedly, always soon enough). If we’re being precise — pedantically so — I’m not a know-it-all but a say-it-when-relevant-all.” Many pedants will surely agree with this re-definition.

By the way, ChatGPT, what do you think of this book (that you haven’t read, but when was that ever an obstacle)? Its response was so long that to save space here I just asked it to review its review, pedantically of course.

“It is a review written, one might say, pedantically: footnoting what it cannot know, correcting itself mid-sentence, and producing a prose style that seems, somehow, to admire and parody its subject at once. The result is less a review than a performance — a querencia of exactitude, where precision mistakes itself for wisdom and cannot quite tell the difference.” Ah, querencia, thanks. How well you pretend to know me.”

Arnoud S. Q. Visser is professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school for cultural history. His books include A Cultural History of Fame in the Renaissance, Reading Augustine in the Reformation, and Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image. The book defines pedantry extremely widely, perhaps (or necessarily?) too much so. The emphasis is on alleged harm done by and to pedants through the ages, and the sociological / cultural frameworks surrounding that.

Despite the author's meticulous attempts at academic objectivity it’s pretty clear that the publisher's perceived audience is one likely to think we've had enough of insistent experts, or at least to chuckle at the thought. One understands the Princeton University Press's need to make the book appealing. Still, chapter headings are as follows: Devious Sophists, Imposter Philosophers, Quarrelsome Clerks, Foolish Humanists, Affected savantes, Effete Elitists and Pedantic Professors. There is a risk that less objective readers may be primed to have their prejudices confirmed.

Visser “reveals how the excessive use of learning has been a vice in Western culture since the days of Socrates” (Publisher's blurb). One has to make an almost muscular effort to insert “seen as” after “been”.

So a couple of questions: what is meant by this excessive use, and why was it (and is it still) seen as a vice? The book shows that pedantry is a social construct, varying across time and context. It is often a defence of pedantry yet somehow invites the reader to rise above or sink below it all and enjoy the many examples of its appearance and the sometimes spiteful employers of the term. This would be a pity because the book, whilst quibble-worthy, is quotable and indeed a Querencia*

*a Spanish loanword, sometimes used in English to mean a place of strength or deepest comfort; a quietly enduring virtue; it is also the part of a bullring where the bull takes its stand.*

*pedantic notes are best placed in the actual text so that none will miss them. They are performative, a display as much as useful knowledge.

This sustained historical analysis of an intellectual stereotype approaches pedantry as a cultural and moral category whose meanings have shifted across more than two millennia. The book’s scope extends from classical antiquity to the present, and its method combines intellectual history, philology, and cultural critique.

However, Part I (of three) shows that accusations of pedantry (before the concept had a name) could come more from intellectual enemies than anyone else, and indeed the tables could be turned. From classical Athens via the Roman empire to the high middle ages it is argued that all sorts of attacks on almost anyone who says anything are attacks on or defences of what we might, at a push, and in the cause of our further and better enjoyment of slanging matches, call pedantry. Why not, in a way. But the actual meaning of pedantry, which is the book’s title after all, seems to get too thinned out, and diluted by an almost dogmatic will to inclusion.

We start with the sophisticated* (*refined, judicious, advanced) Sophists with their sophistry* (*deceptive, cunning, fallacious…) who might charge students 30 times the annual salary of a skilled labourer to learn how to win arguments and intellectual friends and to influence people. Yet they were characterised by philosophical enemies such as Plato as being the money-making branch of expertise, ready to refute anything, true or false.

In 165 CE Peregrinus set fire to himself at the Olympic Games to teach mankind a philosophical lesson. His followers called on him to desist but others yelled at him to get on with it. Recollections of his intellectual prowess may clearly have varied. He was cited as an example of phoney hypocrites, an irritating know-it-all whose orchestrated self-immolation was just attention grabbing, which does seem a little unkind.

These pages, replete with eye-gougings, naked envy, enraged disagreement, satirical excess and students killing their own teachers, speak to the dangers of philosophers practicing what they preach, and also not doing so. Some rather irritating arbiters of what was proper thinking seem to have spent their lives in nitpicking denigration of other alleged pedants. But there has to be some respect for Anaxarchus, a follower of Democritus, taunting his torturers as he was pounded to death in a mortar. (Is not much of Monty Python based on pedantry?) In these and following chapters this reviewer's sympathy tends to be with the pedants.

And on to (early) modern times. Previous pedants were in the main not criticised for pedantry as such, but rather for just being loudly wrong or obnoxious. Now, true pedantry reveals itself. Or the all-inclusive ‘Pedantry+’ again, aided and abetted by its ubiquitous employment. People were criticised for being know-it-alls in any domain, from grammarians to salon philosophers: those who paraded obscure or “useless” knowledge became types to be laughed at. Witty women could make cantankerous old men look pedantic, but salonnières in turn could be mocked for their own intellectual affectations.

The mockery in comedies and elsewhere was sometimes relatively superficial, mostly not life threatening, not too serious, even if vituperative. Pedants might wear ragged clothes and be not really “one of us”. They could also be dragged down by those even lower down the social scale: “a soup slurper, bean eater, lasagne pit”. They were sometimes portrayed as sodomites and pederasts, more dangerous accusations. And how did people know that they had such tendencies? Because it was well-known that that's what pedants were like.

In France, Molière made fun of precious savantes. A servant announces that a footman at the door is saying that his master wants to see the ladies. No no, he is chided, he should have said “There is an attendant without who asks if it is a convenience for you to be visible”. But is such easy Pythonish stuff really about pedantry? As often in the course of the book the question of what the vice that loves to speak its name really is, seems to become fuzzier as it is seen to be part of sexism, class awareness and bigotry. Not least on the part of the anecdotalists, comedic writers and superior philosophers who are used to portray and exemplify what people thought of those who might, sort of, now be regarded as pedants. I suppose that as ever, accusations of pedantry say as much about the accusers as the accused. Plus ça change…

Apparently anyone could be a pedant now, though the true democratisation of pedantry emerges later in part three of the book, where the seeds of today’s very successful attempts to portray the usual suspects such as evidence, facts, expertise and learning as the last resort of the ‘libtard’ are to be noted. Though surely the lumpen mediocrity of current name-callers in today’s vicious attacks on almost all scholarship is unprecedented in its scale and ignorance. There is a mirror image of pedantry that is based upon an insouciant nescience*. Gone are the almost affectionate jeers levelled at unworldly professors in films, in a section, having a slightly tacked-on feel, towards the end.

Some of the anti-intellectuals’ best friends are triumphalist multi-billionaires themselves in the business of the acquisition and distribution of ‘creative thought’, its processes and sometimes baleful poetics. Whilst being taught to despise experts, we must simultaneously love expert systems. Humans with too large a vocabulary are to be considered potential threats whilst Large Language Models entrance us and we ain’t seen nothing yet, probably.

Who, or what, will identify a new form of pedantry in a more or less objective AI, if it starts picking the nits of unknowing, along with the emperors’ new clothes, off the backs of those who would control everything? This book may help us to think about that.

*Look it up.