Just when you thought you knew some people who’re overly pedantic with their devotion to logorrheic minutiae, this guy comes along and sets the bar at a whole new level. Or should I say, “came along”, since he’s been dead for at least four centuries now. Check out this excerpt from “The Story of French” by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow:
The earliest champion of language purism was a poet whose work very few francophones actually read: Francois de Malherbe (1555-1628). While there are many cases of literary geniuses whose writing shaped entire cultures – Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Goethe, Cervantes, Dante, to name a few – there are very few instances of a single person influencing the way an entire people think about their language the way Malherbe did.
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Although he became the official poet of King Henry IV in 1605, at age fifty, and retained that status under Louis XIII, it was Malherbe’s literary criticism, not his poetry, that gained him repute among his contemporaries and turned him into the French language’s first real guru. In his criticism Malherbe preached the values of clarity, precision and rigour. He argued that good writing had to be stripped of ornamentation, repetition, archaisms, regionalisms and hyperbole. Malherbe rejected the idea of synonyms; in his view each word should have a definition, and a definition should apply to only one word.
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Malherbe was quite possibly the biggest and most brazen language snob the world has ever seen. Biographers describe him as a fretful fault-finder who spent his life attacking, both verbally and in writing, every mistake – or what he regarded as mistakes – he could find and anyone who made one. He wanted to banish the word vent (wind) because it was a synonym for fart, and pouls (pulse) because it sounded like pou (louse). He feared no one, and even reproached King Henri’s son, the future Louis XIII, for signing his name as “Loys” rather than “Louys”, an inconsistency that many courtiers would not have dared point out had they noticed it. … Malherbe once refused to be treated by a certain Doctor Guebeneau because “his name sounded like a dog’s name”. On his deathbed he was still correcting the language of the woman who was looking after him.
The emphasis is mine. I mean, this guy was correcting the language of the woman who was nursing him on his deathbed. Case closed.
Before anyone points out, I should state that I know that he wasn’t a “grammar” nazi, since he was more of an orthographic authoritarian, a morpheme Machiavelli, a lexeme licensee, a phoneme preservationist. The term “grammar nazi” is used as a catch-all for all the above, a fact that will no doubt infuriate those who truly are grammar nazis.