I had to look up the word pendantic, I have never heard the word or phrase before.
If I understand the definition of the word it is normally a negative term used to describe a person who is trying to show off his book learning, or is overly concerned with obscure facts, or trivia, and is showing off usually in a tiresome way, mostly quoting unrelated details or facts, being too concerned with literal accuracy and formality.
Well that is some word there, but I do not believe I was being pendantic.
But here on the forum we are very concerned with details, and we are concerned with the obscure facts, and we are concerned with the formality, and even the literary details in how we write on the forum, as in this field the details are very important, the small details can mean the difference in success or failure, in recovery or refining it is normally the small details that will cause you the most trouble and grief, just try and precipitate your gold with sodium metabisulfate (instead of sodium metabisulfite), and see if the detail of one letter in the word make any difference, just skip one small part of a process which can also be the difference between having gold, or a just having one big mess, one small detail in chemistry wrong and you could have a very dangerous situation like an exploding glass vessel in your face, or a lungful of deadly gases knocking you to the floor, or cause you to be blinded for life.
I do not believe I am pedantic, but I do believe the details in chemistry are very important, and when we discuss these on the forum it is very important we pay attention to these small details, and on the forum doing our best to get our spelling correct, can be not only very important in communicating our ideas, but just like refining gold it can help to refine us to be able to communicate better, and many times the better communication can help to keep us out of problems and dangers in our refining or work with chemistry of these metals.
What if we did not care how we spelled, or made our posts on the forum, haphazardly writing the chemical names, or instructions, what if we just sloppily wrote a posts of a very dangerous recovery or refining, not stating all of the steps or left out important details, or safety precautions out in the stages, where one mistake in the process could make an explosive mix?
Would this be the place you would wish to learn from? Would you want to perform these dangerous steps of these chemical reactions, using these sloppy instructions of misspelled words and missing details as instructions, without understanding those small important details?
Wouldn't you rather be able to spell Hokes, and learn to recover and refine pure gold?