WE'VE done a few iterations of the "Words that English should have but doesn't" theme, such as here, and other websites have done them too. Now Cracked weighs in with its own list. If you like juvenile humour as much as I do, click through and have a giggle. If juvenile jokes make you say "how juvenile...", don't. Among the hits are Kummerspeck ("grief bacon"), which my colleague got to a while back; hikikomori, a Japanese word for a social shut-in who spends all day on video games, and pochemuchka, Russian for someone who is constantly asking too many questions. (Pochemu is "why".)

Cracked is the kind of place that does "The 5 Most Badass Presidents of All Time" and "6 Real People With Mind-Blowing Mutant Superpowers". But I don't mean to be dismissive: if there were a Pulitzer for well-written jokes for stoned college kids, they'd win it every year. And who knew they'd sum up my feelings about obsessive punctuation sticklers with a near-perfect metaphor? Number 1 on their list is pilkunnussija, Finnish for "comma fucker." That's a little coarse for my taste (and I have never used the phrase "Grammar Nazi", and never will). But Cracked hits a certain nail on the head:

These are people who have taken the most boring, pedantic aspect of language and adopted that as their cause. It's like a child on a basketball court dreaming of one day being a referee.

Now I happen to love our Style Guide, and I don't just say that because they pay me. It's because it has many short mini-essays on writing and how to think about it, not because I re-read the entry on hyphens every time I need a pick-me-up. Punctuation and other matters of mechanics and usage are certainly important if you want people to take your writing seriously. But to have a pen on hand at all times so you can correct ill-written shop signs is to miss the fascinating forest of language for its most boring trees. Lynne Truss is a vivid and funny writer; I'd love to see her write a book about how to be as vivid and funny as she is, but instead, she made her name on this most tedious aspect of language. It's not her fault, entirely; people love it, and she hit that nerve successfully. There are a lot of pilkunnussijasout there. But while I don't like comma-abuse either, I don't plan to put on any Kummerspeck over it. Life is short.

Addendum: My Danish wife points out that Cracked's Department of Scandinavian Languages picked a poor Danish word for their list. Kælling doesn't really mean "An ugly, miserable woman who yells obscenities at her kids." It really just means "bitch" or "cunt", and is about as ugly as those two. Danish actually has a host of words Cracked would have loved. Bagstiv, a personal favourite, means "still drunk the morning after". Lækkermopset describes someone who secretly enjoys passive-aggressive complaining. And for their number one slot, instead of pilkunnussija, they could have gone with the more general Danish flueknipper, "fly-fucker", which is someone who complains continually and maddeningly about the small details. This would subsume the pilkunnussija, and many other types.

And addendum 2: Kory Stamper of Merriam-Webster thinks that Cracked's Department of Finno-Ugric Studies got pilkunnussija slightly wrong, too. It's just a slightly vulgar Finnish word for "nitpicker", not a specific word for language nitpickers, though the pieces do mean "comma" and "fucker". Come on, Cracked. You call that journalism? You should have gone with flueknipper.

I kid with Cracked, of course. They got in a good line on those obsessed with commas, no matter their Finnish.

(Comments on Northern European interest in sex with very small objects will be deleted, unless they are very clever. Posting slightly edited to take into account the back-and forth over pilkunnussija.)