One person’s care, as we say, is another’s pedantry. Drawing the line isn’t easy, and the damnable thing is that standards change from generation to generation. The goalposts are ever-shifting, about 17 yards at a time.

Even in a given day, there are gradations. Or as the sainted H. W. Fowler wrote in his 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage, the term is relative: “My pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, and someone else’s ignorance.”

We might try to define it. Fowler called it “the saying of things in language so learned or so demonstratively accurate as to imply a slur upon the generality, who are not capable or not desirous of such displays.” That’s not a great definition: it might suggest that every one of Christopher Hitchens’s utterances was pedantic. Or perhaps we might say that of WFB. The generality of people, after all, are not capable of using language as learnedly or as accurately as they did.

It might be more accurate to say that a pedant is one who ostentatiously and rather obtrusively takes pains with trifles — the type of person who interrupts someone who says that Los Angeles has been decimated by the recent fires. “Excuse me, do you know that decimate means to destroy only 10 percent? If you mean widespread destruction, do you really think decimate is the word? The word derives from the Latin decimus, meaning one-tenth.”

You get the idea.

That’s why Eric Partridge, in his classic Usage and Abusage (1942 but much revised over the years) wrote that “the pedant . . . maintains tradition against usage in speech and in writing; he is the trouble-feast at every linguistic banquet, the spoilsport in all word-fun, the wet blanket on all stylistic ardor, the killjoy of every verbal or syntactical exuberance, the ‘sour-graping’ écrivain manqué that crabs the work of the successful or the copious creative writer.”

When it comes to language, maintaining a supposed tradition over widespread usage is the clearest indicator of pedantry. “Supposed tradition,” I say, because part of it involves various imaginary rules that have never been valid: don’t split an infinitive (“Your statement seems directly to contradict what you said a moment ago”), don’t end with a preposition (“He is hardly someone to whom it is worth talking”), don’t use contractions even in speech (“It is unlovely, do not you think?”), adhere to the old shall/will paradigm (“I shall now consult a dictionary”). Among the true cognoscenti, these things were settled long ago against the positions just taken. Among cognoscenti-manqués, they’re still very much in play.

Pedantry, in short, is a dogged insistence on “rules” that educated people widely disregard. That’s why standards can change: the demography of English usage is constantly changing. Hence we can be baffled at editorial stances that usage writers once took. Fowler, for example, objected to We know what each other wants. He demanded that it should be We know what each the other wants. But who could say that with a straight face?

Fowler also disapproved of this sentence: The former had the advantage of being under one control, and that of Napoleon himself. He corrected it to this: The former had the advantage of being under one control, and that that of Napoleon himself. Yeah.

So it’s tough being a Fowler, denouncing pedantry and yet warning people against all sorts of locutions. You’re liable to be caught in inconsistencies. In a book called Better English, one of Fowler’s successors of the 1950s, G. H. Vallins, declared that “there is no more fatuous and harmful activity of the pedant than resisting new inventions.” But then three pages later he railed against ambience as a recent invention and an unnecessary word. In fact, the word dates from the 17th century and, despite gaps in the Oxford English Dictionary’s documentation, was used in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many people today, of course, give it a Gallic pronunciation and spell it ambiance. Are they pedants?

Perhaps Vallins wasn’t being harmful, but his contradictory positions certainly seem pretty fatuous.

The charge of hypocrisy, if it sticks, is brutal. Consider Richard Grant White, the most popular American language commentator of the late 19th century. He wrote that “the right use of words is not a matter to be left to pedants and pedagogues.” True enough.

But he’s the guy who strenuously objected to the verbs donate and initiate. He didn’t like the word scientist, recommending instead sciencist or scientalist — and likewise disparaged photographer while touting photographist. He urged people not to say reliable, insisting that it should be rely-on-able if such a word were needed at all. He stigmatized railroad, instead dogmatizing in favor of railway. He even maintained that a man could not be married to a woman; the woman must be married to the man because marry derives from mari (husband). He added that “there is a kind of dishonesty in the careless and incorrect use of language.”

White, in fact, is infamous in language circles for contradicting what Horace wrote around 12 b.c.e.: “Usage is the judge, the law, and the rule of speech.” The only real question becomes, Whose usage? But White didn’t accept this. He instead declared: “There is a misuse of words which can be justified by no authority, however great, by no usage, however general.”

That’s the pedant’s motto. It allows you to object to anything you don’t like, whatever your linguistic caprice might be. There’s still a fair amount of this attitude floating around.

In part II, we’ll be undertaking the difficult task of giving lots of instances. What’s pedantic, and what’s not — today. It’s a dodgy business, differentiating the language kooks from discerning connoisseurs. But we’ll give it a go. Stay tuned.