For Against

A friend recently called me a pedant my post on the ‘Protest the Pope’ Facebook page. I had pointed out that by adopting the American habit of dropping the preposition it was unclear whether they were planning to protest FOR the Pope or AGAINST him.


Naturally I thanked her for her compliment, after all a pedant is merely someone who wants you to be right. I then set out to further irritate her by reminding her that my pedantry is born, not from an anal desire to pick up on people’s shortcomings, but a dislike of distraction.

What counts as good English, or bad, is highly subjective, but the purpose of language is communication. If the language distracts from the message being conveyed it is being used poorly.

If the language jars, and snaps your attention away from the sense of what is being said to the words being uttered then that is akin to spotting a blemish on an otherwise admirable object. It is like reading a metered poem where the line than does not scan damages the whole stanza.

Some people are going to protest against the Pope’s visit to Britain. I won’t be going to join them, not because I don’t share their loathing of this Nazi misogynist, but because I will be standing across the street with my own protest banner. It says “Protect The Preposition”.