Proof that the less you know the smarter you are

A female geologist was once addressing a meeting organised by Nasa, when a man interrupted to say she didn’t understand what she was talking about, and that she definitely needed to read a paper by McCarty et al (academic speak for ‘and others).

She looked him in the eye, pulled back her hair so he could see her name tag, and said: ‘I am McCarty et al’. The dangers of thinking you know it all are there for all to see, yet still people insist on sharing their boundless wisdom with a fortunate world.

‘Eggheads aren’t really a barrel of laughs’ 

This is the sense in which Dutch academic Arnoud S. Q. Visser has used the word ‘pedant’, rather than the narrower idea of someone who moans about apostrophes. His book is a useful warning for those inclined to advertise their own cleverness.

US President Dwight D. Eisenhower defined an intellectual as ‘a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows’. His predecessor Thomas Jefferson said moral philosophy was mostly useless, as you can’t learn a sense of right and wrong from books: ‘State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor, and the former will decide it as well, and often better than, the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.’

Jacques Goussault, the 17th-century French writer, agreed, arguing it was more valuable to understand the art of living than have ‘a library in your head’. And the ancient Greeks, as ever, knew a thing or two about knowing a thing or two.

Plato criticised those who debated for its own sake – ‘like puppies, they enjoy dragging and tearing those around them with their arguments’. And the playwright Eupolis said that Socrates ‘thought hard about everything else, but neglected to consider where he’s going to get his meals from’.

Hard to disagree, isn’t it? ­Eggheads are rarely a barrel of laughs. Visser has an entire section on the portrayal of arrogant academics in books and films, from the one in Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim who answers the phone ‘history speaking’ to Professor Amos Pomfritt in The Affairs Of Dobie Gillis.

On Pedantry is available now 

When a student argues that an ‘incorrect’ piece of English is acceptable because it’s in daily use, Pomfritt snaps: ‘The rules of English usage are made by scholars and learned men, not by college freshmen and other such vulgarians.’

The best way of dealing with a know-it-all is to mock them. You might quote the philosopher Denis Diderot: ‘He who claims to know everything only shows himself ignorant of the limits of the human mind.’

None of this is to say facts don’t matter. But we shouldn’t become enslaved to intellect.

Visser admits to being a ­pedant as a child. People would say: ‘What expensive words you use.’ He took it as a compliment, but in adolescence realised such reactions ‘expressed unease and mild irritation’.

Another way of putting it is that no one likes a smart-arse.