At Taki’s Mag, Dalrymple reflects wryly on why pedants take such delight in spotting tiny errors and why the rest of us are sometimes tempted to do the same. What begins as fault-finding, he suggests, often masks a deeper desire for order in a world that resists it.
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.