I recently posted a comic strip in which two people get in an argument to the death over whether “on accident” or “by accident” is the appropriate phrase to use. I tagged my wife in what I intended to be a humorous post, because we are on opposite sides of this particular dialectal divide, having grown up about a thousand miles apart. This led to three people responding to say the argument in the comic is representative of my behavior in general, using words like “stickler”, “pedantry”, and “pointless”. Those people are my wife, a friendly acquaintance, and one of my more active detractors. While it’s possible one or more of them are an outlier, the distribution of this small sample suggests to me that this impression could be widespread. I’ve tried to address this in the middle of various discussions in the past, but this turn of events suggests it deserves its own top level post.

A fundamental distinction between the comic and most of the time I spend arguing about vaguely similar aspects of communication is whether or not there is an inaccurate reasonable alternate interpretation for a listener to apply to a message. The comic strip is an example of the “not” category; to the people who grew up with “on accident”, “by accident” doesn’t have another meaning in their dialect, and vice versa. The other phrase is new to them when someone from the other side uses it. They are almost certain to interpret it correctly, with the most likely failure mode being recognizing that they don’t understand it. There is virtually no chance of the listener getting a message other than the one the speaker intended, and so no unintended and/or inappropriate harm can come of those alternative messages being received. After you’ve learned that some other people, or a specific other person, use the other phrasing, there’s no significant reason other than social conformity for you to try to change dialect to match them.

Then there’s the opposite category, where there is such an interpretation. Consider a word like “coke”. Forget the beverage/drug distinction, context can almost always sort that one out. I’m talking about the “coke vs soda” debate in US culture for the last century, which you should google and be aware of if you aren’t already. The first time you tell someone you want a coke and you get back a can of Sprite you’ll probably be momentarily confused. When someone asks you for an “orange coke” and you bring them an Orange Vanilla Coca Cola there will probably be a round of humorous clarification. Like before, there is little to no harm here, possibly some laughing and unlikely any crying. Unlike before, miscommunication did happen, someone received and believed and relied on messages other than the ones the sender tried to send. Fortunately the cost of that reliance was low. Once you know about this distinction, and especially if you know a particular person is on the other side, there’s some small value to be gained by adjusting your speech to fit what you think their interpretations will be.

Finally, there’s a less discrete but more important distinction, a subset of that second category where the harms grow almost without limit. A laugh and a lost can of soda is inconsequential. Losing a partner, a house, a job, a life... physical harm of the sort people remember forever... financial harm measured in weeks or months of salary rather than pocket change... societal impact across tens to thousands of people... not so much. When you know about one of these distinctions, it becomes of potentially paramount importance to avoid this phenomenon when you can. Further, I feel morally compelled to attempt to reduce the frequency of those miscommunications and their consequences in the society around me.

That is where I focus my effort. Of course we can all engage in a few seconds or minutes of good natured ribbing over something like coke/soda, on/by purpose, etc, and I do that sometimes too, but I’m pretty sure that’s not a significant factor in people’s dislike of me. When you see me spending a hundred or a thousand hours trying to convince people not to use certain phrasing for certain meanings, I am trying to prevent large amounts of significant harm. When you say “consent violation”, even though you can point to definitions of “consent” and “violation” that encompass the scenario you’re describing (such as pushing your way out of a crowded subway car), that is not a relevant response to my concern that other people are going to predictably reasonably consistently misinterpret your statement as meaning the other things that phrase means in our shared dialect and language. If someone reading this says “racism” or “sexism” to a random other person in the US, there’s a pretty good chance that person thinks the word means something different, significantly enough so to cause problems if and when the statement is acted upon. In the long run, across many such instances, those misinterpretations are going to cause significant harm, lead to physical injuries, and ruin lives. If you refuse to recognize these consequences of your choices and adjust your behavior accordingly, that makes the consequences your responsibility. That is what I am usually fighting against, and it has nothing to do with pedantry.

If you disagree with, or don’t see, the distinctions I’ve drawn between these categories, I’d like to talk about that here. If you think what I’ve described here doesn’t match my behavior, ditto. If you ever see me responding to an “on accident” or “coke” situation in the way I’ve said here that I reserve for things like “consent” and “racism”, please point it out to me. I did once have someone point out where they thought I was overreacting and I thought I was having a traditional “what is a sandwich” sort of friendly debate, which was very enlightening.