I'm a Pedant
It's true. I'm a certified nitpicker. I hedge and I haw to avoid statements that are untrue. I fuss over details that frankly matter little. But why?
I like rules. I'm a mathematician and a computer scientist. Almost1 all of the ideas I contemplate in these spaces come with well-structured rules. In these spaces, the rules are sacrosanct. You can work with different rules and get interesting results. But the work of mathematician is picking a set of rules and seeing what results come out. Breaking or ignoring rules willy-nilly will result in errors or meaningless results.
Now I don't believe in this rules framework for everything. I certainly believe in linguistic descriptivism, rather than prescriptivism.2 Certain rulesets seem silly to me and I am reluctant to follow them - I am not an anarchist, but if the government lays down tyrannical rules (which gets a bit more concerning each day), I feel obligated to do a bit of rule-breaking.
Conversationally, my rules mindset can cause a bit of a challenge. When people make obviously false statements3, I either feel obliged to challenge them on it or start to take the rest of what they say less seriously. Part of this comes down to foundations. If you are willing to be wrong about little things, how can I expect you to be right about big things - those composites of the small? Argument and logic depend on building up ideas through series of smaller concepts. A single flaw in the fundamentals can lead to a much more impactful erroneous idea.
So I work to keep my words tight. Sometimes I err and sometimes people call me out on it4. Sometimes I get too stuck up on details that really aren't important5 - and I'm working on that. But my fundamental world view, that logic and ideas build on each other, that choices matter, leads me to caring about the little things. I'm a pedant and proud.
You'll notice I use words and phrases like "almost", "probably", and "almost surely" a lot. It genuinely bothers me a bit to use absolute phrases when I know that edge cases exist (or are likely to exist). In most (RE: footnote 1) cases this precision doesn't matter, but sometimes, especially in the realms of math and logic, it does. And so I err on the side of caution and try to be accurate in my day-to-day speech.↩
You might say that rather than not believing in the "rules" of language that form historically I have another language ruleset I am happy to follow that is more flexible to change and cares more about communicating.↩
These are often universally quantified statements - e.g. all apples are fruits. Can be reasonable when discussing foodstuffs. When discussing characteristics of people or policies, these statements almost always have exceptions. (I have another post on bias I will eventually link to once I've written it).↩
If you don't have anyone who calls you out on your mistakes, find someone(s). It is much harder to find these mistakes on your own, especially if the people around you ignore or applaud your errors. (There are many caveats on how to have this in a healthy, positive environment, but the overall point is still an important one).↩
A wonderful term that I learned in software engineering is bikeshedding. It feels appropriate in many kinds of conversation.↩