The inevitability of techno-pedants
Simon Waldman wrote an interesting piece on Saturday, though not too new if you’ve read his previous work. What was innovative was the medium — the op/ed pages of Saturday’s Guardian. But reading it, I could see the wrath of the blogosphere coming down on him.
The critical section was:
The world our Berliner will launch into is almost unrecognisable to the one that greeted our last major change - the redesign of 1988. It was a world with only a handful of TV and radio channels, where the only digital device in your home was an LCD watch or a pocket calculator. There were no mobile phones (well none that you could honestly call “mobile”), no Big Brother, and most important of all, no internet.
I think that “no internet” was meant to go into the list of items in your home, not the list of items in the world. But that’s not stopped Dave and Simon’s colleague Jack Schofield rushing to correct him.
Amusingly Simon also raises hackles when he says:
An Australian who has never seen a copy of the Guardian can read something we have written and agree or disagree with it on his blog
An Aussie commenter on Onlineblog says: “What a bizarre 19th-century view of the world. I’m an Australian, and I’ve seen many many copies of the Guardian, and you know why? Because I’ve travelled the world.” Crucially, the commenter mistakenly inserts a comma in Simon’s words, which might indeed project the wrong meaning. Simon was referring not just to any Australian, but an Australian who has never seen a copy of the Guardian.
Amusingly, Simon only wrote his piece because Ian Mayes, the Readers’ Editor, was away that week. Though Ian is supposed to address more weighty matters such as fairness and balance, most of his postbag reportedly comes from pedants discussing spelling and grammar.
At the time of writing, Simon has not responded to his hair-splitting critics. I suspect he must be slightly regretting offering to fill Ian’s shoes.
