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A short while ago, I read a review of a history of pedantry.

A pedant, I take it, is a man who delights more in error than in truth. He does not want to learn, he wants to correct. I have several books in my library, some of them quite long, in which a pedantic previous reader has underlined a misprint or a small grammatical mistake and inscribed three exclamation marks in the margin, say on page 219. At last, he has found what he was looking for and pounced on it like a raptor diving from the sky! How happy he must have been to find something to assuage his ravenous hunger for error to expose!

A pedant is a man happy in his disdain.

When I started to review books forty years ago, I thought it would be fun to tear them apart (metaphorically) and to point out all their errors, no matter how small, but my desire to do so soon lessened and then disappeared entirely. From then on, I decided, I would make no correction of errors, of fact or interpretation, unless such errors were seriously misleading and would lead a reader to a false conclusion. Along with this softening of stance came the desire always to say something good about a book under review, even if it appeared only as damnation with faint praise, because after all, a book always represents someone’s labor, and with a little effort, some saving grace can usually be found in it.

But I understand the joys of pedantic correction because they still tempt me. Such correction gives the pedant an easy victory, sometimes over someone much more distinguished than he; he feels a sense of vindication, as if his life has not been spent entirely in vain. He is more than equal to what he had corrected, albeit a masterpiece.

Occasionally, the pedant performs a public service. For example, I have twice corrected factual errors on Wikipedia. They were very small errors, on matters of trifling importance, one of them the date and place of the first performance of one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. This was not a correction to change the course of empire or history, but if information on small matters is to be given to the public, it might as well be correct.

I felt very virtuous when I had made my corrections, for of course I had done so both anonymously and gratis, for the good—the very slight good—of humanity. And as good works should be done anonymously, so should corrections that would count as pedantic if he who made them sought glory or expected some public recognition for them.

But I think the joys of pedantry go deeper than that. I think that pedantry is often, if not always, an effort to keep at bay the fear of disorder in the world, and of the meaninglessness and fleetingness of human existence. A man who scours a text after its publication for error (I am not speaking here of copy editors, who scour it beforehand) thinks that he is engaged in important work, saving the world from misconception; but in reality, he is defending himself against insignificance.

Pedants make themselves hostages to fortune, for they themselves are sometimes mistaken, and it is difficult to forgive the errors of a pedant. In my pedantic phase of book reviewing, I once corrected something that (as I thought) was in error but that was, in fact, correct. I was mortified when this was pointed out to me. I had introduced error where it had not existed, but my mortification was not guilt at having done a public disservice, but that of personal humiliation. He who lives by pedantry dies by pedantry—so to speak. And as a Muslim fears that there is someone more Islamic than he, so a pedant fears that there is someone more pedantic than he, someone more talented at sniffing out the mistake lurking in almost every human utterance. One resource always available to the pedant is to respond to any statement containing the slightest abstraction by saying, “It depends what you mean by…” Thereby the pedant can lead a whole roomful of people down a rabbit hole of semantics, distracting everyone from more substantial inquiry.

Pedantry is to the intellectual, or would-be intellectual, what excessive housepride is to the housewife. The second law of thermodynamics is against such a housewife, whose goal of perpetual perfection in the arrangement of cushions, knickknacks, and everything else in her house means that she cannot relax for a moment because that great law is ever present, malignly waiting to thwart her. The price of tidiness, in her sense, is eternal vigilance.

The human mind, having only a certain amount of space available to it (metaphorically, of course), can occupy itself only with limited material at any one time. If and when it is emptied even of that material, disturbing and unwanted questions of meaning and purpose enter, questions that do not admit of easy answers, or any answers at all. We invent tasks to fill our minds to avoid the irruption of those questions into our consciousness.

“Can’t you stop me thinking, doctor?’ was a question prisoners in the prison in which I worked quite often asked me. They did not mean by this that they wanted to eliminate any thought in particular; they meant thought as such. For, it having been decided a long time ago that prisoners could not be put to work against their will, most of them had many hours of time that hung heavy upon them, and they had nothing else to do but think. They have since been allowed television to substitute for thought.

The goal of human life, then, when survival is no longer in question, is distraction. The poet A.E. Housman captures this very well in one of his poems. He himself was a pedant of heroic proportions, devoting decades of his life to a laborious edition of a Latin poet, Manilius, whom not even classical scholars read—an edition never superseded, and that will never be superseded. He wrote the following (I mention in advance that the word “lief” here means “gladly”):

Could man be drunk for ever
With liquor, love, or fights,
Lief should I rouse at morning
And lief lie down of nights.

But men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).