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.

…

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.

…

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.

Only 292 billion years left to delete this file? No hay problema!

What do you think?

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Here’s an excerpt from 1992’s Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, one of my favourite authors. It’s true that on topics of sheer lunacy, only comedians are brave enough to speak the truth, by mocking the lunacy in question.

Where do gods come from? Where do they go?

Some attempt to answer this was made by the religious philosopher Koomi of Smale in his book Ego-Video Libe Deorum, which translates into the vernacular roughly as Gods: A Spotter’s Guide.

People said there had to be a Supreme Being because otherwise how could the universe exist, eh?

And of course there clearly had to be, said Koomi, a Supreme Being. But since the universe was a bit of a mess, it was obvious that the Supreme Being hadn’t in fact made it. If he had made it he would, being Supreme, have made a much better job of it, with far better thought given, taking an example at random, to things like the design of the common nostril. Or, to put it another way, the existence of a badly put-together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere.

This suggested that the Universe had probably been put together in a bit of a rush by an underling while the Supreme Being wasn’t looking, in the same way that Boy Scouts’ Association minutes are done on office photocopiers all over the country.

So, reasoned Koomi, it was not a good idea to address any prayers to a Supreme Being. It would only attract his attention and might cause trouble.

And yet there seemed to be a lot of lesser gods around the place. Koomi’s theory was that gods come into being and grow and flourish because they are believed in. Belief itself is the food of the gods. Initially, when mankind lived in small primitive tribes, there were probably millions of gods. Now there tended to be only a few very important ones – local gods of thunder and love, for example, tended to run together like pools of mercury as the small primitive tribes joined up and became huge, powerful primitive tribes with more sophisticated weapons. But any god could join. Any god could start small. Any god could grow in stature as its believers increased. And dwindle as they decreased. It was like a great big game of ladders and snakes.

Gods like games, provided they were winning.

Koomi’s theory was largely based on the good old Gnostic heresy, which tends to turn up all over the multiverse whenever men get up off their knees and start thinking for two minutes together, although the shock of the sudden altitude tends to mean the thinking is a little whacked. But it upsets priests, who tend to vent their displeasure in traditional ways.

When the Omnian Church found out about Koomi, they displayed him in every town within the Church’s empire to demonstrate the essential flaws in his argument.

There were a lot of towns, so they had to cut him up quite small.