Thursday, December 15, 2005

Pedantry

Four of us sitting around celebrating Bob's 50th birthday with a pub lunch in the Star and Garter. Sadly the Old Bob was no more and the Reverend James ran out before we got to try it. After a particularly petty intervention by someone I said, 'Just what I wanted - lunch with a bunch of pedants.'

Joe said, 'Can three people be a bunch?'

Respect. Priceless.

3 comments:

Martin said...

Do you count yourself amongst the pedants?

Stewart said...

The appropriateness of Joe's intervention is entirely dependent on how you intended to use the word 'bunch'. Bunch can be used to denote a considerable number - in which case he was correct to question you - or it can be used to signify that the grouping in question has a common characteristic (in this case their pedantry) regardless of the size of the group. However even if you meant to use the word in the latter sense, Joe's intervention was still perfectly reasonable given that he couldn't be sure that you knew you were using the word correctly.

Darren said...

LOL
can't stop laughing at this.