Yes, that’s the adjective form, so the apostrophe will be the least of their problems. Makes it funny for me, and MAYBE THAT’S THE POINT!
Also, there is nothing wrong with that apostrophe. Now, if the possessive noun were a proper noun ending in S, then the pedants would have a field day, because some stylebooks show the possessive case with apostrophe S and others just with an apostrophe (Charles’s tonsils versus Charles’ tonsils). But there is no disagreement that an ordinary plural noun ending in S shows the possessive with just an apostrophe.
Oh, wait, this doesn’t show the possessive. Never mind.
This is at least the second time recently we’ve been pedantic about the word “pedant.” I love that.
None of us pedantics want to be “anonymous.” We want to SHOUT OUT TO THE WORLD!!
/// Except maybe for us Minnesota Nice Pedantics, who will settle for saying “Well, that’s different.”
“Pedantics”? *Pedants.* Sheesh. Apolgoies.
“Um… Shouldn’t it be ‘Pedants’?”
How pedantic of you.
Oh… I see what you did there!
Shrug, I thought Minnesota pedants just corrected people very apologetically.
I’ve got a button that says “I am not pompous. I am pedantic. There is a difference.”
MiB, I prefer the other Nancy button:
“I’m not pompous; I’m pedantic. There’s a difference. Let me explain it to you.”
People might also like my definition of a pedant: Someone you resent for knowing more than you care to.
“Oh, wait, this doesn’t show the possessive”
You could make a reasonable case either way. Which is why the pedantic folks who made the sign didn’t get it right in the first place.
And you, CIDU Bill, are our president.
Alcoholics / Pedantics ?
I think Olivier has got what the artist was going for. Well spotted!
People probably didn’t notice that (myself included) as there are A LOT of different anonymous groups, the majority not ending in ‘-ics’, that people are familiar with, so the association isn’t immediate. A quick check of Wikipedia shows a list of over 30 such groups, including Clutterers Anonymous and Under-earners Anonymous. I need both.
Ironically, or maybe on purpose, that name would wind up the pedants far more than the apostrophe, I feel.
Except, Oliver, the name for the person is “alcoholic” and the name for the person is “pedant.”
“Except, Oliver, the name for the person is “alcoholic” and the name for the person is “pedant.””
If I understand Olivier correctly, the artist most likely knows this, but used the invented word ‘pedantic’ on purpose to make it sound similar to ‘alcoholic’ for the sake of the name of the group, and maybe giving it wider recognition among the readers. If so, it didn’t work, but I’m with Olivier. I think that’s what’s going on here.
Only pedants are likely to know what he’s talking about, regardless of whether he used “pedants” or “peandantics'”. So why annoy the one group who might get the joke?
Stan explained it better than I could have.
Another instance of YMMV, I guess, because I always associate Anonymous with Alcoholic (probably because in France, the other groups are not as widely recognized).
But I remember seeing a vanity plate reading AA MEETING and asking my cousin why anybody would brag about it; he was flummoxed by my remark because he read it as “to a meeting”, not “Alcoholics Anonymous meeting”.
@Olivier, if you brag about going to an anonymous meeting in a way that makes you easy to identify, haven’t you created a Paradox of the Cretan and destroyed it?
It would be a coming out of the cabinet?
How did I know this would be a long thread?
If this had been a German comic, the problem would not have been the word (or the placement of the punctuation), it would have been the shape of the apostrophe. Germans have a very hard time getting the right character out of their keyboards, because the “correct” key requires a “shift”, and is less obvious than the incorrect options, such as “backquote” (`) or “acute accent” (´). Even when the correct “ASCII” apostrophe (‘) is typed, many German word processing programs (including MS-Word) will turn the character into a typographic (“curly”) ‘single quote’, and since German uses bass-ackwards quotation marks, the resulting “apostrophe” is upside down.
P.S. I cannot guarantee the shapes of the examples in this pedantic rant, because WordPress has its own screwball logic about how to convert ASCII quotes into typographic forms.
P.S. I typed that name with a lowercase “P”, but I expect that WordPress will convert it to CamelCaps.
P.S. All that ranting, and then I blew the close italics token. At least I was right about WoRdPrEsS’s fascination with CamelCaps.
A company I might or might not be employed by seems to have a lot of people in its marketing (you know, communications) group who don’t understand how to use apostrophes. To the point that a large number of folks refer to them as ” apostrophe’s” (yes, with the bogus apostrophe; there’s also an “s” in the company name, which gets its own apostrophe).
My dad used to wish for an apostrogun, which would add/remove apostrophes on demand. I’d buy one!
Given the history of this comic, several people are giving too much credit to the cartoonist’s intentions.
An indigent person is an indigent. The poor people are the poor.
Don’t you have to have certain credentials to be a pedant, who, after all, is nothing more nor less than a teacher? A person with no teaching credentials and who does not teach for money or as a volunteer is not a pedant but may be pedantic and if so is a pedantic. The teachers I have known tend not to be pedantic when not engaged in teaching so in my experience pedants aren’t pedantics and pedantics aren’t pedants.
“Don’t you have to have certain credentials to be a pedant”
I think the word you want for that is “pedagogue”. While one definition of “pedant” is “pedagogue”, as far back as 1913 Webster’s Dictionary said that definition was already obsolete.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Yes, that’s the adjective form, so the apostrophe will be the least of their problems. Makes it funny for me, and MAYBE THAT’S THE POINT!
Also, there is nothing wrong with that apostrophe. Now, if the possessive noun were a proper noun ending in S, then the pedants would have a field day, because some stylebooks show the possessive case with apostrophe S and others just with an apostrophe (Charles’s tonsils versus Charles’ tonsils). But there is no disagreement that an ordinary plural noun ending in S shows the possessive with just an apostrophe.
Oh, wait, this doesn’t show the possessive. Never mind.
This is at least the second time recently we’ve been pedantic about the word “pedant.” I love that.
None of us pedantics want to be “anonymous.” We want to SHOUT OUT TO THE WORLD!!
/// Except maybe for us Minnesota Nice Pedantics, who will settle for saying “Well, that’s different.”
“Pedantics”? *Pedants.* Sheesh. Apolgoies.
“Um… Shouldn’t it be ‘Pedants’?”
How pedantic of you.
Oh… I see what you did there!
Shrug, I thought Minnesota pedants just corrected people very apologetically.
I’ve got a button that says “I am not pompous. I am pedantic. There is a difference.”
MiB, I prefer the other Nancy button:
“I’m not pompous; I’m pedantic. There’s a difference. Let me explain it to you.”
People might also like my definition of a pedant: Someone you resent for knowing more than you care to.
“Oh, wait, this doesn’t show the possessive”
You could make a reasonable case either way. Which is why the pedantic folks who made the sign didn’t get it right in the first place.
And you, CIDU Bill, are our president.
Alcoholics / Pedantics ?
I think Olivier has got what the artist was going for. Well spotted!
People probably didn’t notice that (myself included) as there are A LOT of different anonymous groups, the majority not ending in ‘-ics’, that people are familiar with, so the association isn’t immediate. A quick check of Wikipedia shows a list of over 30 such groups, including Clutterers Anonymous and Under-earners Anonymous. I need both.
Ironically, or maybe on purpose, that name would wind up the pedants far more than the apostrophe, I feel.
Except, Oliver, the name for the person is “alcoholic” and the name for the person is “pedant.”
“Except, Oliver, the name for the person is “alcoholic” and the name for the person is “pedant.””
If I understand Olivier correctly, the artist most likely knows this, but used the invented word ‘pedantic’ on purpose to make it sound similar to ‘alcoholic’ for the sake of the name of the group, and maybe giving it wider recognition among the readers. If so, it didn’t work, but I’m with Olivier. I think that’s what’s going on here.
Only pedants are likely to know what he’s talking about, regardless of whether he used “pedants” or “peandantics'”. So why annoy the one group who might get the joke?
Stan explained it better than I could have.
Another instance of YMMV, I guess, because I always associate Anonymous with Alcoholic (probably because in France, the other groups are not as widely recognized).
But I remember seeing a vanity plate reading AA MEETING and asking my cousin why anybody would brag about it; he was flummoxed by my remark because he read it as “to a meeting”, not “Alcoholics Anonymous meeting”.
@Olivier, if you brag about going to an anonymous meeting in a way that makes you easy to identify, haven’t you created a Paradox of the Cretan and destroyed it?
It would be a coming out of the cabinet?
How did I know this would be a long thread?
If this had been a German comic, the problem would not have been the word (or the placement of the punctuation), it would have been the shape of the apostrophe. Germans have a very hard time getting the right character out of their keyboards, because the “correct” key requires a “shift”, and is less obvious than the incorrect options, such as “backquote” (`) or “acute accent” (´). Even when the correct “ASCII” apostrophe (‘) is typed, many German word processing programs (including MS-Word) will turn the character into a typographic (“curly”) ‘single quote’, and since German uses bass-ackwards quotation marks, the resulting “apostrophe” is upside down.
P.S. I cannot guarantee the shapes of the examples in this pedantic rant, because WordPress has its own screwball logic about how to convert ASCII quotes into typographic forms.
P.S. I typed that name with a lowercase “P”, but I expect that WordPress will convert it to CamelCaps.
P.S. All that ranting, and then I blew the close italics token. At least I was right about WoRdPrEsS’s fascination with CamelCaps.
A company I might or might not be employed by seems to have a lot of people in its marketing (you know, communications) group who don’t understand how to use apostrophes. To the point that a large number of folks refer to them as ” apostrophe’s” (yes, with the bogus apostrophe; there’s also an “s” in the company name, which gets its own apostrophe).
My dad used to wish for an apostrogun, which would add/remove apostrophes on demand. I’d buy one!
Given the history of this comic, several people are giving too much credit to the cartoonist’s intentions.
An indigent person is an indigent. The poor people are the poor.
Don’t you have to have certain credentials to be a pedant, who, after all, is nothing more nor less than a teacher? A person with no teaching credentials and who does not teach for money or as a volunteer is not a pedant but may be pedantic and if so is a pedantic. The teachers I have known tend not to be pedantic when not engaged in teaching so in my experience pedants aren’t pedantics and pedantics aren’t pedants.
“Don’t you have to have certain credentials to be a pedant”
I think the word you want for that is “pedagogue”. While one definition of “pedant” is “pedagogue”, as far back as 1913 Webster’s Dictionary said that definition was already obsolete.