>Pedantic is about being correct. [...] Being pedantic is an effort to reduce them. At the risk of my comment being pedantic about "pedantic", the context of h

>Pedantic is about being correct. [...] Being pedantic is an effort to reduce them. At the risk of my comment being pedantic about "pedantic", the context of how "pedantic" is typically thrown around is to alert readers of a hyper-correction that doesn't matter to the discussion.[0] For example, if I say that some smarthome intelligent light switches sometimes have a 1/2 second lag instead of being "instant on" which is jarring to the user experience, a debater in pedantic mode would then say something like "even a regular dumb light switch isn't truly instant because of General Relativity, it _still_ takes picoseconds to propagate the flick of the switch action to the state change in the light radiation, blah blah blah" That so-called "correction" is _true_ but not material to the actual type of discussion. The discussion was consumer UI and not physics. If the context is UI, it's actually ok to be a little sloppy with what "instant" means. The underlying issue is that each commenter cannot write <billions qualifiers> before each statement. Therefore, the qualifier words we omit lets others pounce on a seemingly glaring hole in the argument (i.e. not reading with charity) and reply with something pedantic. [0] Excerpt from MW dictionary https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pedantic#faqs https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pedantic#faqs: >Is pedantic an insult? Pedantic is an insulting word used to describe someone who annoys others by correcting small errors, caring too much about minor details,