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Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.

If I can make one generalised statement, and generalised statements are never entirely true, nobody wants to be talked down to, kids included.

Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.

I was a confident, outgoing little boy. If you're an only child, you're living in a very linguistically adult world, and you've got to keep up. So I did. Maybe I was slightly annoying.

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

I was a different kind of kid, oversensitive and all that.

People of little understanding are most apt to be angry when their sense is called into question.

I really look at children as being little people and not necessarily things or people to control.

My upbringing as a child was very atypical.