Pedantry or communication?

Pedantry or communication?

"Don't text and drive" shouts the advice from the billboards along the road. I'm in full agreement with the campaign and its goal but I object to the advice: I do nothing wrong if I text and then drive - or if I drive and then text, for that matter. The problem is with texting while driving. "Don't drink and drive" made sense because the sequence was right: if I drink and then drive, then I'm driving while drunk, which was the thing to avoid. "Don't drink and drive" has a better ring to it than "don't drive while drunk" but "don't text and drive" doesn't express the troublesome synchronicity of texting and driving.
If I voice such objections, they're in danger of being dismissed as mere pedantry. "You do know what we mean" people say dismissively. I do think that I understand what they want to say but why don't they say it more clearly? I also manage to guess what small children mean in their agrammatical utterances but society still insists on educating small children and teaching them to speak and right properly, i.e. utilize grammar to express what they want to say with more clarity and hence effectivity. If good communication is rejected as pedantry, then it's communication that suffers doubly: firstly because it's not effective and secondly because the discussion is sidetracked to pedantic issues.

The home as background to video conferencing

The home as background to video conferencing 

As most people, I've generally enjoyed the tasks of the interior design of my own home. Arranging activities relative to spaces, building elements and furniture is a recurring issue, even when nothing changes in the activities or the building. Sometimes it is because of new insights, either from personal experience or from what others have done, sometimes it reflects new opportunities for change and sometimes it's purely due to boredom with the existing situation. 

Designing my own home is obviously from my own perspective and that of those who share it with me. I consider everything with respect to my actions and their needs, my interactions with family members and guests, and imagine the situation as I (and they) would view it: from the inside out. The external viewer is sometimes also taken into account (after all, I live in a practically glass house in the Netherlands) but their perspective is limited to what they could see in the garden or through the windows. 

The Covid-19 measures have changed this. Most of my professional contacts have become virtual, including through video conferencing. This means that many people now see the interior of my home from a perspective opposite to mine. While previously I viewed the arrangement of my computers from my vantage point, now on the computer screens I also see what the others see behind me: the photographs on the shelves, the kitchen sink and many other details from an often unflattering perspective. 

Many have taken action to remedy that and not just by using virtual backgrounds. They chose their workplace at home with care, so as to show a safe, neutral or attractive part of their home life. Some have separate places for working and for video conferencing. Quite a few feel that their privacy is invaded, while others make use of the opportunity to impress. For me, the interesting part is how strange sometimes my own home appears from the perspective of the video conferencing camera. It is as if it reveals things that are relegated to a fuzzy background in my own perception, arguably because I move and sit differently oriented to the camera in a device I'm viewing.