Thursday, 9 July 2020

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.

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